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.”
Then maybe what you are conflating is capitalism and commerce, because the concept of fair trade has been around since the dawn of time and you likely won’t ever get to see it in your city. Try travelling somewhere less “fortunate” with their social/economical expectations and see if your happiness standards still apply.
So still no idea what your point even is. There are some isolated parts of the world with fair-trade and happiness all over where being forced to have a child is great, and being poor doesn’t matter at all for procreation. Makes sense.
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…