I accidentally read the comments on the post and got as far as this one:
“Honestly, since we're going towards socialism, we need to abolish child support. Women have the right to get an abortion because it is their body their choice. A man has to use his body …”
I mean that's just reductio ad absurdum to be haughtily oblique about the whole issue.
Social programs =/= socialism. There are plenty of capitalist economies with robust social safety nets - most EU countries provide free healthcare, education, and forms of UBI in the forms of grants for artists and social welfare for those incapable of working.
It's rather unfortunate that so many people are against genuine equality when it comes to reproductive rights.
While it makes perfect sense to me that a pregnant woman should have final (only?) say in whether or not she carries a child to term, it strikes me as rather off that:
* Outside of marriage, the biological father has no rights when it comes to participating in their child's life, whether we're talking custody or mere visitation.
* The father has no right to avoid child support despite having no say in either its birth or participation in their lives.
* Upon being targeted by the state for child support responsibilities, the court system virtually never allows cessation of payments upon a failed paternity test (i.e., paternity fraud). Note: roughly 30% of paternity tests that are performed reveal children are not biologically related to their presumed fathers.
* In about half the states, it's illegal to even perform a paternity test without consent of the mother.
I do find it fascinating that many people will use the very same blase "you should have thought of that before having sex" dismissals when bringing up any of the above issues as are used so often against women fighting for their right to abortion.
tl;dr: child support should be linked with visitation/custody rights. If a father abandons or is denied those rights, they should be absolved of child support, especially if it's proven they aren't actually the biological father.
Matt Levine's introduction to this story made me laugh:
“If you have a certain sort of mind, you might think ‘no, people respond to incentives; if the grid paid for every efficient lightbulb, we’d save more electricity.’ If you have a certain, not unrelated, sort of mind, you might think ‘well, if nobody is getting paid for installing these lightbulbs, maybe I should get the money.’”
Abandoned doesn't have to be forever. As I got older I had a longer time horizon and more skill, and found I was picking up and finishing projects I'd laid aside decades earlier.
Now when I put something aside I know there's a chance I might pick it up again in ten years. There wasn't much evidence of that when I was twenty-five.
It's been one of the best things for me about middle age.
Totally. It’s usually a lack of time, lack of energy, general ‘life getting in the way’, that leads me to drift away from a side-project.
These factors can always be reversed. And (whisper it) a bit of vibe-coding can also help unstick a project that ground to a halt because the next step was dull implementation rather than exciting creation.
Sometimes also the project is just 'done'. I many years ago made a windows screensaver (never released to anyone else). Just so I could have a '2001' screen saver. Basically in the background of the movie was all these screens flashing just weird status stuff. It was a cool aesthetic I kinda liked. Spent many weeks getting it to flash 'just right' and have the right animations for the right feel. Then LCD screens basically killed any need to have a screen saver. As basically instant on/off meant there was no reason to have the monitor running all the time. So the project was done.
As someone who feels stressed about not feeling able to finish the side projects I have (that is, working on my music player, learn Arabic, and learning to draw), this is a very refreshing take. Thank you for this.
Last time I looked into this (last week, I think) it was a big wad of nothing. The people had disappeared over a span of many years. They weren't tied to any particular program, employer, or even any particular area of study, just “uh, tech stuff”. Some of them were technical experts, some weren't; one was an administrative assistant. One was killed by a campus shooter who also killed two students.
Typical example: “In the years since, several others connected to JPL have also died or disappeared: Frank Maiwald, a specialist in space research, died in Los Angeles in 2024 at 61.”
If the weather service starts an investigation into Tuesday’s rain shower, that should be reported. But if that rain shower was completely within the normal range of weather for that location and time of year, that should also be part of the reporting. This article takes everything from the government at face value.
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