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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1874 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for November 13, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Yesterday, I was indirectly reminded of an old classmate I had in 5th through 7th grade. Out of idle curiosity, I looked him up and found that he had died of a fentanyl overdose last year.

I hadn't really thought of him for decades, and we weren't all that close back then, so it didn't hit me particularly hard, but it did shock me a bit, since he didn't really seem the type. He was from a high-SES family, both parents being archaeologists, and in the same gifted classes as I was. His best friend from back then is an attorney now.

I wonder how people's lives go off the rails like this, even when they seem to have everything going for them.

Some people just seek out drugs in a terminally irrational way. People look for all sorts of explanations- maybe it’s childhood trauma, maybe it’s society, maybe it’s lack of meaning or maybe it’s something else. But sometimes it’s just the type of person, a person who is chronically unsatisfied, very high in sensation seeking, impulsive and short term in thinking, and low in insight. Addicts are often born, not made. Why? Because drugs feel good, that’s about all there is to it. Which makes the above a deadly trait in todays society thanks to Mexican drug gangs having essentially open access to the americas drug markets

I wonder how people's lives go off the rails like this, even when they seem to have everything going for them.

I've written about this before but people like to imagine that they're safe as long as they stay within the bounds of socially prescribed behaviour and have a reasonable amount of money. This is not true, there are tons of things that can debilitate you that society or modern medicine can do little about. Maybe a divorce leaves you broken and alone, maybe an illness leaves you with long term issues, maybe you develop a chronic health or pain condition as you age or after an accident, maybe you start self medicating stress with alcohol and you lose control?

There are a thousand mundane things that can make you worse of and potentially break you. It's easy to ignore or rationalise these things as consequences of mostly moral failures and that you would "solve" if you happened to be affected.

It's easy to say that one should walk a mile in someone's shoes before judging them but actually doing that is extremely mentally unpleasant. Ignoring all the risks of permanent/semipermanent intolerable suffering around you until you're directly affected is much easier and probably mentally healthier, even if it isn't very empathetic.

I'm not sure this is necessarily the case here. Doing fentanyl is pretty much the definition of being out of the bounds of proscribed behavior. There's a lot of people who all into fentanyl from life dealing them a harsh hand, but there's also no shortage that just fall into the path of trying then abusing harder and harder opiates. Seems a little premature to assume the man in this case is one or the other when both paths are very real.

Outside the bounds of prescribed behavior. It's a highly proscribed behavior, unless the fentanyl is prescribed.

My point is that there are a thousand paths there even for upstanding citiziens, many starting due to things out of your control. The reason for failure to imagine them is because remaining wilfully ignorant of them is preferable, just like it is better to ignore the ignoble consequences of aging. We can often do little to nothing and it's a fucking horror show.

Insecure attachment often plays a major part. Seemingly normal parents can have messed up, cold relationships with their children. This can cause a constant black cold pit in the soul of the child, which a lot of people try to salve with drugs. Once they get into the habit of patching up all the pains of life with drugs, they are physically and mentally addicted and from there the road to stronger and more dangerous things is short.

How the hell do people have kids??

I'm a rather pronatal person. I very much would like 2 kids at the bare minimum, 3 if I can wrangle it. Not today, or next year, but starting hopefully in my early 30s.

That being said, I find the prospect of having kids in the West deeply anxiety inducing. How do people manage while being in nuclear families? Where do they get the time and energy?

If I did have kids back in India, I'd have the immense relief of parents willing to lend financial and physical assistance rearing them, and happily. Domestic help to boot. Schooling and education costs nowhere near as bad as in the West. Even if you don't have the family to help out nearby, parenting is definitely easier for a professional couple.

When I look at the comparative difficulty in the West, I find it not particularly surprising how fertility rates have plummeted. I'm all for it in theory, but deeply daunted in practise myself. Especially assuming my prospective partner is a working professional.

There are other places in the "West" than the USA. Education is essentially free in many of these places for example. Or free until the kid is 18+, at which point the parents presumably had a lot of time to financially become stable. Otherwise student loans and scholarships exist. And most people don't go to university anyway.

If you actually check the numbers, you might be surprised to find out the fertility numbers are nowadays actually lower in many parts of non-West even compared to the "West", or plummeting so fast that likely they will be lower in a couple years. Turkey has had lower fertility rates than Germany in the last couple years for example.

Westerners aren't (entirely) some weird rugged individuals. Many grandparents help their children quite a bit with child-rearing and overall financials in early adulthood. You seem to worried specifically about raising children in the West as an immigrant without family or savings.

There are other places in the "West" than the USA. Education is essentially free in many of these places for example. Or free until the kid is 18+, at which point the parents presumably had a lot of time to financially become stable. Otherwise student loans and scholarships exist. And most people don't go to university anyway.

I'm not in the US, and there's a reason I intentionally used "the West" instead of a specific country. The additional difficulty of child rearing seems to me to be a phenomenon present in most Western countries, and quite a few non-Western ones.

The cost of education isn't a major worry for me, at least on behalf of my kids. I expect the idea of college to be antiquated by the time they're 18, or even the concept of current systems of formal education for the purpose of becoming an earning member of society. I don't plan to save money for their college fund, since I doubt they'll attend one, though of course I wish to be financially prudent and save money in general for their sake.

Westerners aren't (entirely) some weird rugged individuals. Many grandparents help their children quite a bit with child-rearing and overall financials in early adulthood. You seem to worried specifically about raising children in the West as an immigrant without family or savings.

I don't deny that there are people who are lucky/sensible in that regard. My surprise is expressed towards the idea of those who don't have those resources and yet have multiple kids! When they do so, they're doing something I perceive as difficult, and where they don't bother, I see why. While I might not have very close family in the West, I do expect to at least have money by the time I do have kids, even making an above average amount. The issue is that the money doesn't buy nearly as much time as I'd like, and yet there are people worse off doing it anyway.

It scales a bit. After reasonable success with the first one, the 2nd was different but less anxiety producing. The 3rd and 4th even less so.

We had been DINK for some time. After the 2nd there was a move so my wife could be a SAHM. I don't think we'd have 4 if we were still both working in demanding careers shuttleing the kids between creche / daycare and school etc.

Thanks for doing your part to fight dysgenesis.

It's nice to be noticed. 🙂

I agree that after having the first one, things get easier and scale better, two kids don't require literally twice the time and money as the first, especially when you've moved your life around to adjust.

I doubt the SAHM thing will be an option, but there are some options to cut down working hours even as a doctor (going from 48 hours a week to what most professions consider as standard at 40 hours).

doubt the SAHM thing will be an option

I know what you mean.

During the maternity leave for our 2nd it gave us a glimpse into what it could be like.

The loss of income has impacted our lifestyle. We're not jetting around anymore as much. Though we did manage 3 weeks abroad this year with the children.

Generally I think we're happier. I don't think the locum roles were intrinsically rewarding or fulfilling.

Were fertility rates higher before because it was easier to raise children (to some required standard) then?

People smarter and better paid than I have speculated on the global, secular decrease in TFR and there's no single conclusive answer I'm aware of.

That being said, I personally lean towards a decrease in community and family support being major issues. Having siblings and parents nearby to help with looking after kids is a big help. Add in delayed child rearing (often due to lengthy higher education eating up potential fertile years) and people, like me, being concerned about how they're going to handle the time costs (or make enough money that they can trade it for other people's time). And to a degree, the heightened expectations and demand to micromanage worsen things as you contemplate, you can't just kick kids out till sundown to make their own entertainment these days in many places.

I'm confident I can bite the bullet if need be and have kids despite how daunting a prospect it seems, but it's looking like a damn hard thing to pull off.

#Procrastination thoughts:

(As always with Wellness Wednesdays, if you have never suffered from this problem, please don’t proclaim How Easy This Has Always Been For Me, You Just Need To Buckle Down And Do It.)

On ADHD-style time-blindness: Some moments are a destination, others a path to other moments. Learn to differentiate these, not mistaking a path-moment for a destination-moment… or vice versa. Playing with your sister’s kids is a destination moment, not something just to get through. Playing games on your phone with as little depth as Cookie Clicker out of boredom is a path-moment; don’t build a life around it.

On the states of mind of procrastination: I find my personality shifts depending on the state of my distractions, not the state of my work:

  • I don’t want this Now to end, because I’m harvesting Fun, even of the worst and most boring sort. Or maybe the best sort, because I’ve got a schedule but yeah, I’ve got time. I am “Not Done” playing. I am in Freud’s id mode, and my name is Not Done.
  • I don’t want people to stop me from completing my procrastination activity, because it cost me too much hassle to get to this point and I’ll be damned if I give up the progress, but time is summoning me out of Now-mode, and I know I have responsibilities to get to, and I am “Almost Done” with my distractions. I’m in Freud’s ego mode, and my name is Almost Done.
  • I am doing the needful and my distractions are outside the warp bubble of flow mode. Time and I are partners here, I am digesting time as fuel. Whatever I was distracted with, it’s in the past and “I’m Done” with it whether I finished it or not. I’m in Freud’s superego mode, and my name is I’m Done.

Time blindness is very very real, especially for those like me with severe adhd.

This is mainly a vent.

I find myself withdrawing from 'trying' with women, socially. I used to attempt to strike up friendly conversations with with people in general, but naturally with an emphasis on not-unattractive women. Not in a particularly flirty way, either.

And I find myself constantly disappointed that they keep finding a way to get in a reddit-y snark along the lines of "Men, Amirite?" I try to be non-argumentative in this context, but I increasingly have the urge to go meta-therapist and say something like "I feel like there's a lot of implicit hostility in that statement. I have my own frustrations with, you know, girls and stuff, but I'd consider it rude and a bad look to bring it up in conversation with a stranger. Are you trying to hint I should go away, or do you just think this is how people talk in #currentyear? Because I really can't tell anymore."

I used to attempt to strike up friendly conversations with with people in general, but naturally with an emphasis on not-unattractive women. Not in a particularly flirty way, either.

Do the opposite, start with flirty stuff around hot girls. Girl issues are normal and I sense that the girls you talk to can sense that you want to flirt but are on the fence. Also if you want to go home with girls you meet, never go away unless its fiarly obvious, no need to be creepy but getting a strong rejection once or twice is not bad at all.

Please write more about your issues. I was terrible with girls, somewhat better now.

No, openly flirting gets you a lecture about straight guys always assuming they're not queer, or rates of sexual assault, and engaging with a "Men, Amirite?" quip with anything other than soy appeasement immediately labels you as an anti-feminist chud trump-voting something-or-other, with a possible reference to internet bogeymen from 2016.

Do you have an example conversation here? If the women are literally saying "men amirite" in response to any kinda normal conversation starter, it does seem like a weird crowd.

It's possible that I'm just unlucky enough to live adjacent to the art/punk/hipster neighborhood of a major metro area. It has the most pronouns and trannies per capita in the entire midwest. I also move in geek/gamer circles, and like short haircuts.

And I find myself constantly disappointed that they keep finding a way to get in a reddit-y snark along the lines of "Men, Amirite?" I try to be non-argumentative in this context, but I increasingly have the urge to go meta-therapist and say something like "I feel like there's a lot of implicit hostility in that statement.

That is your problem. The correct tactic is to double down/be provocative. The same way if a woman meets your gaze while you look at her deep deep cleavage, you shouldn't turn eyes away but smile.

yes, she knows whats up, you know whats up and you hiding it is a complete turn off. You dont have to explicitly verbally agree to stuff but your subcomms and intent should.

A while back a girl asked me if I fancied her, I gave a non answer and was hesitant, trying to act cool which I should not have.

I don't encounter this as much as I might in an English-only environment (though I am sometimes in those), but I find and have always found that a sense of humor works wonders. Even if you don't change anyone's mind, at least you've made someone laugh (even if that someone is only yourself.) I can't script your situations obviously so this advice may be useless to you, but generally I wouldn't take such jibes particularly personally. There's a whole ethos taking this kind of I'm With Stupid (and stupid is Men) as some kind of norm, but also women may have been through any number of situations that may have embittered them or otherwise turned them shrewish. Take the high (and humorous) road if possible.

I'm familiar with women who've suffered particularly negative experiences with men, up to and including sexual assault. I've dated several of them. The ones who've been through actual bad times don't go "Men, Amirite?" or talk about patriarchy and male privilege and the scourge that is straight white men. They have pain and ways of expressing it that are very specific to them, not a generic snark that sounds like it came from a 2015 BuzzFeed article.

Is this an effort to trump my response? Or to take the discussion to a place where humor has no foothold (i.e. bringing up assault etc?) You're learning loads.

The best response if you come across this is to smile warmly and exit the conversation.

Eventually you will find girls that don't try to test if you are willing to humiliate yourself for the chance to spend time with them. They're more common than you'd think.

I used to try all sorts of 'flip the script' nonsense during my PUA days, but now I find I just can't stomach spending time around women with attitudes. Luckily I found that the sooner you jettison these people from your life, the better you feel.

Flip the script

Is that from mystery method or what?

You can just avoid shit tests entirely, the new meta so to speak by guys like fastlife is to avoid shit tests altogether. Also you are right about not wanting such girls around though the advice to leave is not good. If you wish to spend the night with the girl and her remarks are not completely crazy in a serious way then you should burn the set to the ground, at least then you would know more about what your own standards with this stuff is and if your own approach had issues.

op mentioned how he would talk to unattratcive girls without the intention to flirt, that cant be helpful unless you are simply building state.

Talking to people without the intention of banging them is a completely normal and healthy behaviour. Even for lotharios who wish to cultivate their attractiveness, talking to unattractive women purely to socialise is something to be encouraged. As is talking to men, old ladies, children etc etc.

Talking to women who are recalcitrant, while still giving some experience, is in the end a waste of time. Worse, it can burn a guy out from enjoying time around women which is the worst thing you could ever do as a single man. Just don't. Eject. Go find someone with a warm attitude.

Have you tried going "women amirite"? In a joking tone, of course.

I believe the accepted phrase is "Women! Can't live with em..."

<awkward silence>

It's not much different from before; I still am doing roughly the same amount of work but have had days off because of goofing around. I did start waking up early to workout so better on that front. I met a friend of mine who posts about medieval and sorta pre-modern times, and his point was that women are overrated in a way that

  1. They are hornier than you think and way hornier than you
  2. They can't have any grand sweeping plans or ideas about civilization

Now, I have never had a relationship since I am a broke founder living with my parents at 24, I have met very few girls that I liked, and none live here. Right now, I need to be alone to fix my own issues. Not just productivity but also baseline discipline, better self-image, and some skills so that I can actually be employable and build upon that. Anyway, I don't get the skepticism my friend has.

I know Goethe had a fantasy about having a smart girl he would lie around with and the pillow talk would be about something intellectual. Anyway, most people I know have a different opinion but food for thought.

I have a deadline to finish my book and build parts of my first web app by this Saturday. See ya folks around, also don't text women in relationships or married, it is not wise.

They are hornier than you think and way hornier than you

They might be hornier than they have been socialized to be, but I sincerely doubt women are hornier than men on average. There are lots of studies that show that men watch more porn, want more sex, have more sex when it's man-on-man than women when it's woman-on-woman.

yep, mtf trans people report a higher sex drive universally which is why I could not believe it.

They can't have any grand sweeping plans or ideas about civilization

for an easy counter example that will not dox me and can be verified easily: take some politically active feminists

plenty of grand sweeping plans and ideas about civilization (yes, I disagree with basically all of them for modern ones active in Western world)

and way hornier than you

evidence as exists (including porn market) seems to also clearly falsify it

his point

why you thought it was worth posting?

I knew he was likely wrong, I just wanted to hear what others thought about it since I have not been with girls for more than a few hours at a time and no one talks about politics in nightclubs.

My grandmother died at the start of the month, after a long year of close brushes with death. I wasn't there for the bitter end - I was in Sydney while she rotted away on the other side of the world, crippled by a tumour she would never get over.

The last time I ever saw her, it was over a call. She wasn't responsive enough to say anything or even give any indications that she was there, and it was disconcerting to see just how unrecognisable she was. The way she looked was halfway between human and mummified corpse. Her eyes were half-open and defocused, and her arm, now shaped like a long, attenuate claw, jerked up and down haphazardly. My family tried to convince me she could still hear and understand; they were almost certainly lying either to me or to themselves, drawing spurious correlations out of random noise so they could hope there was something there.

Even if she could hear me, everything I could say would just have been a pathetic insult. "How are you doing?" Terrible, thanks. "I hope people are taking care of you well." My catheter is uncomfortable, and the nurses won't do anything about it. "I've been pretty good on my end." Fuck off. I ended up telling her about my day, and the last thing I said to her was something laughably trivial and inconsequential, hilariously stupid in hindsight. There was nothing particularly graceful or poignant or even sad about it. I was never close to her - quite the opposite; she had done a good number of ethically questionable or downright repulsive things during her life - but seeing someone I once knew turn into a flesh puppet, flailing around aimlessly on the bed like a poorly rigged 3D model, was profoundly disturbing in a way that's hard to articulate.

Shortly after the call ended, a blackout fell over my apartment building. This had never happened here before, and it was night time so the entire room was blanketed in darkness - all there was to do was sit in the silence and think. Walking out into the corridor presented a scene from a horror movie; the halls of the building were lit with a strange liminal yellow-orange light, and the background hum of the building - which I usually take for granted - had completely died out. It took two or three hours for the power to come back on.

A couple hours after the call and the strange blackout, my grandmother died. It appears her husband took her death extremely badly. He initially seemed in denial about what had happened - he was surprised to realise her body was cold, and refused to let the undertakers take her away, snapping at anyone who tried. For a while he kissed and slept beside her deteriorating corpse, and by the time they managed to pry her away from him she was disintegrating so badly they had to rush out a cremation. Her ashes are now in an urn at the home she once lived.

Ever since then, this has popped up repeatedly in my mind. I'm not even in mourning - I'm more relieved that people can start moving on now, since everyone was being held in stasis for the longest time - rather, it's something else. I've thought about death a lot, but the existential dread of seeing someone wither away like that is really potent, and the weird, coincidental timing of the blackout doesn't help. I certainly won't try to find any meaning in it; that would be doing the same thing my family did when they insisted she could still understand, but this is probably one of the most terrifying coincidences that has happened in my life, and I am still rattled by it despite my agnostic nature.

I don't know if I should even post this, to be honest. If this comment gets deleted later, don't be surprised.

EDIT: Thanks to everyone for sharing their condolences and their experiences with the death of family, it's much appreciated. I don't think I'm going to delete this now, but it did feel strange posting about something so personal on an anonymous online forum.

My family tried to convince me she could still hear and understand

My family did this too. On the one hand, I want to argue back; a month ago she could barely hear us when she was directly looking at us and had a hearing aid, do you really think it's better now that her eyes don't open and there's an oxygen machine running constantly? On the other hand, that will just make my mother sadder and not actually help anything.

Either way, you have my condolences.

Bad month for Mottizen grandmothers I guess.

If it's any consolation, I spent the night of her death sitting by my grandmother's bed watching football and reading the Phaedo. I didn't feel that much better about the whole thing than you seem to. The funeral process largely felt like masking my autism about the whole thing. I'm happy that my grandmother moved on before much more was taken from her.

I'm sorry for your loss.

My Grandfather passed very recently. He lived a long life into his 90's. He just caught a chest infection one day and deteriorated quite quickly in hospital. He eventually just asked the doctors to stop treating him and switch to palliative care. After 3 days he passed away. He wasn't responsive once they switched to palliative care, being in something of a delirium.

My father did not take his passing well. This is partially because it's his last parent going and also because he himself is in hospital for chronic health conditions and couldn't attend the funeral. It was a bit of an existential crisis in the sense that myself and my siblings have realised that our father likely doesn't have many years left in him either.

For myself, I'm glad Grandfather passed relatively quickly without a long drawn out death from something like dementia. He had his faculties up to the end (with just some physical frailties) and was still driving himself around. He lived a good, long life and left behind a successful and loving family. I'd be lucky to follow his example.

I'm reluctant to post this last part because I don't expect anyone to take this seriously. I'm agnostic, but I sensed when my Grandfather passed. I was in a hyperfocused state doomscrolling at the time. I'm normally completely shut off from most of my emotions when I'm doing this, but I sensed a presence so I stopped what I was doing. I made a prayer for my Grandfather to commend him to God. I felt a warmth like a loving hug and knew he was saying goodbye and that he was fine. Then it was gone. Minutes later I got a text that Grandfather had passed 10 minutes ago. So that was a thing.

Like yourself there's a good chance I'll be deleting this one later on.

Edit: I'll keep this one as long as you do mate.

I'm reluctant to post this last part because I don't expect anyone to take this seriously.

Listen, I'm just a crazy spirit helping out my diety, so my opinion and $6 will get you a nice festive White Peppermint Mocha from Starbucks, but I take your experience as serious as a heart attack and completely believe that it happened to you exactly as you described it. In my own family my paternal grandmother was infamous for her presence in her home after she passed away until my grandfather joined her several years later. Both he and my uncle received occasional guidance from her and at least one direct message, usually when they were looking for something. Sounds woo woo and hokey, right? But how would you feel if you were wondering where that screw was that dropped out of your glasses and a thought came unbidden into your mind and said, "it's in the heel of your shoe!" It blew my grandfather's mind for sure. While I never had a personal experience involving her after her passing, it felt like she was hanging around the house to me, too. In fact, I'd say that her presence was palpable while he still lived. I've had many other personal experiences in my life as well, more than enough to satisfy my own questions about life, death, the afterlife, etc.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go torment some drunken writer/poet...

I offer my condolences to you and your family. One of my not so close relative had stage 4 pancreatic cancer and her last days were painful, she looked worse than a corpse, death was a better option than being alive.

Death comes for all, we can only be nice to ourselves and others who we have around, to those will be around us in the future. There is no good advice here besides things that have been regurgitated, I've myself never seen a family member I was very close to pass away despite being 24. My grandma passed away 20 years ago so I couldn't understand anything. One day she was reading me stories under the trees in our front yard, another day she was just gone.

You should post things here. A mistake I made before was weeping about emotional issues in front of girls I knew, this is a controversial take though I'll say it anyway, people need a place to vent anonymously. I post my life online so that I can be honest with my self and soon enough that can help me act the way I wish to in the world instead of lying because I wish to evade judgment. You should write all that you have out, helps a lot. I mention girls because I'd nearly weep in front of them whereas they needed me to be the guy they could share problems with. It's old fashioned but this is what I believe in.

This is why I support euthanasia.

These aren't the cases you really need euthanasia for, though. Morphine and all its more modern alternatives are some strong shit; we know how to handle physical pain right before the end. The metastasized tumors in my mother's lungs made her more and more tired for months, until she never woke up again, but with the pain counteracted there was no reason for her not to want to get as many awakenings as possible.

What we can't do anything about is mental suffering. My father's tumor went metastatic before treatment killed it, and its progeny recurred inside his skull, where the fight with them became an existential horror, crushing various chunks of his memories and personality one by one, leaving an increasingly confused and terrified remnant behind. I try to reassure myself that, a week or two before the end when his frequent screaming sessions changed from "Help! Help!" to "Hell! Hell!", it was surely only because he'd lost more fine motor control, not because he was making a deliberate evaluation of his situation.

I want legal euthanasia, with the explicit ability to create a medical directive that instructs and allows my family to be the ones to order euthanasia at some defined point after I'm too far gone to do so myself. There's a bit of a paradox in the fact that the only circumstances under which I'd want to kill myself are those where I would be non compos mentis and so both personally and legally unable to do it.

My condolences. You surely know this already, but if you are blessed enough to live long, you will see a similar tableau many times over--relatives, your own parents, acquaintances, and friends. I could quote a poem to you, and almost did just that as a reply, but it seems dull to do so.

Delete if you want but I think this site needs a bit more personal raw honesty about concrete matters and your post certainly qualifies.

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