That a very significant part of the human population could, at any point (!), decide to switch to crypto as its currency. A currency that gives 1 million coin to each living human and says go and prosper. Could this happen? Maybe when is the better question.
Get married. Doesn't work out? Divorced. Buried in debt for a decade or more, house gone, credit ruined, alimony indefinitely, child support forever, visitation up to a court. As a function of bad credit, impossible to ever get decent job, home loan, etc. ever again. All your insurance premiums get jacked. I could go on, and on and on.
They speak of advantages? At 50% failure rate in the US, with seemingly three disadvantages for every advantage, only the insane need apply.
Welcome to America.
* Student loans might almost be worse. You can dissolve a marriage.
Even that stat is a bit misleading, since first marriages have been almost twice a likely to last as subsequent marriages.
And even that is still misleading about marriage odds. Low income, teen or near teen women have a much higher rate of divorce than the rest of the population.
Many marriage stats are more measures of how marriage is defined by society than measures of how married relationships are going. People who would have gotten married just for show 50 years ago aren't getting married at all now, because various stigmas are gone. Same-sex marriages are counted now but weren't before. The average marriage in Utah is very different from the average marriage in Massachusetts, and neither one of them is your marriage.
Why would divorce bury you in debt, take your house, and ruin your credit? You pay child support if you are married too, it just is called "parenthood" rather than child support. If you are paying alimony indefinitely, it indicates that you didn't damage your career when getting married, so the concerns about being buried in debt seem odd. And again, you pay alimony if you are married too. It is just called "supporting my stay-at-home spouse".
And divorce is not some random outcome with a fixed distribution. It is a specific outcome that involves you and another person. You can make decisions that control your future. You aren't flipping a coin.
> It is a specific outcome that involves you and another person.
That means a half of it is beyond my control. I can try to be a great partner. And I can find someone who seems like they would be a reliable partner. But no one can perfectly predict other people; sometimes people change. And if my partner happens to meet someone more attractive and decides to upgrade... there is not much I can do about it. I have seen people who seemed like happy couples, then one of them met someone else and decided they no longer felt happy in the existing relationship.
> You pay child support if you are married too, it just is called "parenthood" rather than child support. [...] And again, you pay alimony if you are married too. It is just called "supporting my stay-at-home spouse".
You are right that a married man contributes financially to his family. But he is also involved in the decisions. At the very least, after the children grow up, he can encourage his wife to take a part-time job again, and maybe a full-time job later. If instead, depending on the specific laws at given state, he is legally required to pay his ex-wife indefinitely, she has no reason to change the situation.
Also, it is cheaper to live together, and more expensive to live apart. Two houses are usually more expensive than one, even if they are small ones. You can save a lot of money by cooking together, sharing household appliances, maybe sharing a car, etc. So the divorce naturally increases the total costs of living of the people involved. Paying half of the increased costs is more expensive than paying half of the original costs.
Then there is also the fact that in marriage the man gets something in return. Like, he brings home the salary, but his wife cooks for them both. After divorce, he keeps paying, but now he is getting nothing in return.
tl;dr - divorce is more expensive than marriage, and it is partially out of your control whether it happens
People can change, but you might be underestimating the amount of control you have not only in choosing a person but building a relationship. It is very different than two independent people experiencing independent lives and changes therein.
> You are right that a married man contributes financially to his family.
I very deliberately left gender out of my post. I don't think it makes sense to bring it back in. A of the rest of your post is gender stereotypes and an unfortunately transactional view of marriages. This just reads as tremendously cynical and bounded view of what marriage actually is and doesn't reflect my experience as a married person whatsoever. In my marriage I want to give to my spouse because it makes me feel good to share love with my spouse. Not for any transactional reason. Not because I expect something in return. But because I love them.
Feel free to choose not to get married. It isn't for everybody. But I think you'll be a happier person by reorienting your view of the world here.
I'm not sure about the U.S, but in some countries, like mine, some of the legal disadvantages of marriage start automatically after cohabiting for a period of time.
This is at least partially biological. We are competitive because our survival depends on it, and deception is of utmost value in a competitive environment. See all of Capitalism, for example.
>We are competitive because our survival depends on it
Says who? Our survival, as does the survival of almost all life, actually depends on Cooperation. I'd highly recommend checking out the book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution by Pyotr Kropotkin. You can find it for free online (legally, its public domain) https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/4341 .
This is good context but isn’t a justification. You didn’t say it was but I wanted to emphasize that a biological reason isn’t a moral justification.
> deception is of utmost value in a competitive environment
All lying is deception, but not all deception is lying in the sense I intended. I make the distinction because camouflage, wood patterned linoleum, or mental reservation (outside oaths and other serious matters) are all forms of deception but are not lies.
> See all of Capitalism, for example
Don’t conflate capitalism with Marketing! It isn’t unfair to characterize marketing as weaponized lying. Selling my beets at the farmers market is capitalism but is not lying.
>Selling my beets at the farmers market is capitalism
No. It is not. People have been selling their wares at markets for thousands of years. Capitalism has only been around for about 500 years.
Capitalism is a system of economics where the means of production (Capital Goods) are owned privately by the owning class (The Capitalist). It's a relationship between the owner class, and the worker class. Owning the farm and employing workers would be Capitalist. Selling wares to a market is just commerce/trading.
I spent three months in the Deschutes National Forest this summer, drought conditions throughout. I watched everyday as honeybees and yellow jackets happily shared a pan of water I'd leave out for them. The third guest was an interloper assassin wasp called the bald-faced hornet (Dolichovespula maculata), and it loved drowning honeybees. If this hornet was around, I'd return to a pan full of dead honeybees.
At first I asked myself, "Can honeybees really be such poor swimmers?" Then I noticed the hornet essentially pushing them into the water (shocking them? zapping them, disabiling them?) and later eating them.
I don't know if this hornet is an invasive species or if the predator-prey relationship is already known, but a single hornet can wipe out tens of bees a day. A contributor to honeybee collapse? Maybe.
The major concern is what if government-funded industry such as this succeeds, thereby encouraging more of it, the slippery slope to state capitalism and then Marx. The term escapes me, but it's some sort of neoliberal woo woo I can't quite remember. It does look rather iffy when you're whaa whaa'ing China for its state-funded industry when you're state funding industry, in other words. Socialism bad. Cooties! Everybody run! All that jazz.
It takes me a couple hours to watch a movie, a couple days to read a book. I can re-watch the movie or re-read the book, and enjoy them again even though I already have. The plots won't change; they are predetermined; nonetheless, I am entertained on repeat consumption.
A suitably advanced entity could do the same: consume the entirety of my life (for whatever purpose, entertainment), its trials and tribulations, as easily as I do a book or a movie. A century of time would be a small nothing to an entity who could intake 100 quadrillion fps to my 35 fps. It could "play" my life for its amusement as easily as I play a DVD.
That said, the experience of déja vu, re: predetermination, will never stop giving me the creeps.
I have long attributed déja vu to a peculiar looping phenomenon in the mind. It's hard to describe. I don't have any real facts to base it on, just that when I experience it I often "skip down" a few more levels and revisit earlier times I had déja vu. It feels like recursion of neural pathways or something. It does make me feel strange, but I try to enjoy the ride when it happens.
It's that I can see the future for a few seconds that bothers me most. Not the “I've been here before” but the “I've been here before and I know what happens next” and that exact thing happens. It's that few seconds of clairvoyance I find superitchy.
I'm fairly rational, however. I'm sure there's an explanation that's not magical.
I've never felt a sensation of peering into the future. I can see it as a possibility depending on which end of the phenomenon you're processing first, the actual event or the repeated signal.
You don't have to do anything. You don't have to be anyone. You don't have to go anywhere. Life is not going to stop because you don't do something with your life. What are the 100 trillion lifeforms on earth, 8 billion of them human, doing that's so essential?
And there's a lot to being an Everyman. It's not a life lived unwell, or it doesn't have to be. One could well argue that unwellness is a function of doing. Read I. Berlin’s In Defense of Idleness.
