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Congratulations and best of luck! I found that one to two was a reasonable transition, but it is a shock to the system getting back into the baby game if you’ve been out for a while. Three is crazy but it adds a lot of fun as there are more relationships in the family.

I found that there was a lot of existential stress as a single guy in my thirties. There is still a lot of stress but it’s more of a day to day stress. I also find that the long school year becomes a grind of school, lessons, driving and homework. Summer is where it really pays off.

The really bad marriages I’ve seen all had red flags. Single people need to be prepared to call it off, even during an engagement.

I think marriage and family add a lot of resilience to your life. We actually kind of enjoyed the Covid lockdowns with our little ones. And if your job or career go bad, as they may, you don’t have all your eggs in that basket.

I would finally add that kids add a lot of hope and joy to the world. Our babies and toddlers have often made strangers smile. And children at a funeral are a symbol of hope. Our society would be a lot happier with more children around.

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Yes even as a married guy I was having existential dread turning 30 because of the challenges of getting my wife to agree to start a family, it has been much less bad since. We have going for us that our kid is old enough to help with the baby she is always trying to set up little beds for the cat and stop her from walking away lol. We don't believe in school though and in part it is because I hated it so much I simply cannot go through it again.

It is funny how unused to being around children our society has become as a whole, totally different than in Africa or other places like that where everyone has been around a ton of children their whole lives.

And yeah, being married is the best indicator of long-term financial success for such reasons. It does also encourage better habits in a variety of ways but more than anything you have two people on a team.

Regarding the hope at a funeral, in a beautifully poignant moment of life, after my grandfather died, well immediately before but after we had said goodbye as he finally got them to let him take off the CPAP, we were commiserating in the hall of the hospital as one does when some Guido looking guy walked out of a door and whooped in excitement, initially annoyed at his disruption of our somber moment, we realized the door above him said "Maternity" and that his child had just been born.

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Congratulations, I hope everything turns out just as you planned it.

Minor points:

"What gets me, though, is these lunatics believe that over the course of several decades humans would not take basic mitigation actions, such as when they claim people in northern cities will all die of heat stroke in the 2070’s which implies that no one will install air conditioners over the course of 50 years."

The people I am most concerned about dying of heat stroke are poor people in Pakistan and India, where they already experience a few days a year where working outside is fatal. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-india-ahmedabad-extreme-heat/

" Similarly they say this about sea levels rising, despite that the technology to live below sea level has existed since antiquity and building a few feet of sea wall provides no technical challenges [in fact, there is already a shipping lane spanning the entire Eastern seaboard, which was surely much more difficult to build than some sea wall around low lying areas.]"

Just because the technology exists does not mean it will be used. It is much less likely when the time required to implement any scheme is dramatically shortened because the rate of the rise in sea level will be well outside of anything any human has experienced on this planet. https://sci-hub.scrongyao.com/

Similarly, fast sea level changes will be caused by the failure of the AMOC..

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09022024/climate-impacts-from-collapse-of-atlantic-meridional-overturning-current-could-be-worse-than-expected/

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well, most of the world is ruled by idiots, so you have a point about not doing it. Do you know anything about Ancient Miletus? One of my favorite stories about human folly is the silting of the harbor of Miletus which happened over hundreds of years. All of the Eastern Mediterranean has been silting since the end of the Ice Age, Polybius in fact thought the Black Sea would imminently cease to exist due to this cause [and talks about it at some length.]

Miletus, a colony of Megara in Anatolia, became much greater than its mother city, one of the finest in the Greek World. However, the bay on which the city sat was constantly filling in, you can see a map here:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Miletus_Bay_silting_evolution_map-en.svg

Everyone knew this happening over 1000 years. Eventually, by the 6th century, it was a landlocked small town, and then a ruin, but the harm to its ability to have a major port came much sooner.

The Ancients moved incredible amounts of soil all the time. For example, in Thucydides they are build circumvallations and counter-circumvallations all over the place [primitive siege walls.] Anyone who has done something as modest as planting asparagus knows how much work it is to dig a basic trench. Yet, the ancients moved enormous amounts of soil all the time, and anyway sand and silt have a variety of construction uses. What amazes me is that no one in Miletus ever started the tradition of sending the whole population down to the harbor a few days a year with buckets to remove silt from the harbor, given that the nature of this problem was not in question. Alternately, they perhaps could have dammed the Meander in some way and employed people to remove the silt which built up behind it [in NW WA they removed a dam near the entrance to the Puget Sound a number of years ago and the aerial pictures of the amount of silt which was released are pretty incredible.]

Anyway, you are absolutely correct that just because someone could do it doesn't mean anyone will do it, but regardless, an attitude that the problem is too insurmountable to be worth trying is certainly not helpful if one believes this is an existential problem.

Regarding India and Pakistan, that is a fair point, though humans have always lived many places where it is too hot to work during some days of the year, the bigger problem is if they lack the resources to be idle on those days, or lack a way of working at night, which are probably both true but also not permanent problems.

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also I just looked at that link and it's funny he should say "Will be like trying to grow potatoes in northern Norway"

That seems to work out quite well in the classic text The Growth of the Soil, and also I happen to know there are frost resistant potatoes from the Andes, my father once went to Peru to collect samples of them [he worked as a plant biochemist]

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I think that is what the author was trying to get at—much more difficult but not impossible.

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perhaps, what I found the most curious about Growth of the Soil was if he found so much success homesteading north of the Arctic Circle why no one else had done it, well why he was able to find virgin land there, but I think that also related to the climate changing with the end of the Little Ice Age etc.

I suppose it's not obvious the authors source material either, so it's possible it is entirely unrealistic though I know a fair amount about homesteading and everything in the book would work to the best of my knowledge, so he must have had some idea what he was talking about.

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Yeah, India is really screwed. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/sustainability/our-insights/will-india-get-too-hot-to-work?cid=other-eml-mtg-mip-mck&hlkid=d9123139e8be4912add2c58402c8278f&hctky=1926&hdpid=6c581513-0b85-4d31-8c18-e561d9221513

That is an interesting analogy, though where it falls apart is that the scientists are pointing to sea level rise as one of many highly unwanted side effects of the earth transitioning to a new equilibrium temperature. Currently, all the feedback is trying to keep the earth in this relatively mild equilibrium temperature. But we are running the risk of going past a few tipping points, which would be essentially irreversible and could put us as high as 10 °C above where we are now. (like the planet has been before, just like it has been snowball earth before). If sea level rise were the only thing to worry about, then I could see trying to build sea walls, et cetera, as productive. But it's the potential for ending civilization as we know it that is the real worry. This paper has some great graphics that explain the concept better. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1810141115

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I mean the thing you have to ask yourself is why would the "experts" be right about this when they are constantly wrong about everything else, including this many times? It is convenient that global bureaucratic tyranny is generally the proposed solution.

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The thing you really have to ask yourself is why would Exxon, with more money than God, not be able to come up with an alternative theory that is even remotely plausible. And look who gets to be the celebrities of climate change, some silicon valley dickhead who makes such a piss poor attempt at pulling an Elizabeth Homes, but can't even get fake investors.

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I mean that they’re liars who just want global government is an extremely plausible alternative theory. You k ow who else has more money than God? General Electric, the largest manufacturer of “green” technology

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I could argue that GE point significantly, but I'll pass because its irrelevant. The fact remains that not just Exxon, but every major oil company has practically unlimited $ at its disposal and every incentive to pass the buck onto someone else. And they failed. Repeatedly, So they picked up the tobacco bobby's playbook and have been treating us like idiots ever since.

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When I laid down to sleep last night I remembered a great quote which I should have found a use for,

In War and Peace Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky says of the Little Princess, "Ah, a wife! They're all like that, no sense in getting unmarried."

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