NekkidCuties

Here are links to some posts on the other ‘Safe-for-Work’ Blog.

Part 1- Lifecycle for the Median Person in West is Damaged Beyond Repair

Another feature of adulthood in the West after the mid-1980s is the decay or collapse of anything resembling a stable family. While some might point to a few ethnic groups or educated professionals still having somewhat “normal” families, the reality is different. Let me explain that in some more detail. In the past, most people (regardless of class and income) got married in their 20s and had children. We can debate if such marriages were happy or even desirable, but in retrospective even the barely functional ones provided a noticeably better environment for children when compared to the single-parent families.

Part 2- Lifecycle for the Median Person in West is Damaged Beyond Repair

Given that most people who reached working age in first 4-5 decades after 1945 were in a stable job or career by their mid to late 20s, a 25-30 year mortgage made sense since it would give provide about a decade of leeway for them to be able to own their house by the time they were in their mid-60s. However this length of time was also based on a few other unspoken assumptions such as an expectation that majority of marriages would not end in acrimonious divorces, loss or change of job would not affect income to a substantial extent, most employers would also pay defined benefit pensions and the cost of raising children including for their higher education would be low.

Part 3- Lifecycle for the Median Person in West is Damaged Beyond Repair

Once we add in the time and money necessary to pay back all those the inevitable student loans (esp in USA, Canada, UK etc), it becomes obvious that even those in the rather few careers which still promise stable and well-paid jobs cannot afford their own houses until they are well in their 30s. While some manual trades (plumbers, electricians etc) can still make decent money at young ages, this is not relevant since the majority of those without university education make far less. Furthermore, it takes only one unexpected medical bill, acrimonious divorce etc for people to lose a lot of money and their house.

Enjoy!

Here are links to some posts on the other ‘Safe-for-Work’ Blog.

Dune, Islam, Arab Nationalism and Star Wars

We can finally stop pretending that the Fremen are something other that Muslim Arabs in the Middle-East or that Arrakis is some place other than the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa. Denis Villeneuve does a pretty good of highlighting this underlying subtext to the audience in a multitude of ways from how actors look, landscape, architecture, traditional dress etc. The similarities between how Harkonnen use aerial military power to attempt subjugating the Fremen has more than a passing similarity to scenes of conflict from the Middle-East, which we have all seen since the early 2000s.

Chinese E-Commerce Outlets Will Soon Destroy Their Western Competition

Yes.. most of the stuff you buy on American e-commerce sites is made in China, often in the same factories and on same assembly lines at the stuff sold on Temu, Shien etc. In fact, over the past 2-3 years, it is becoming increasingly hard to ignore that a lot of products advertised and sold on Amazon are identical to those on Temu, but significantly more expensive than on the later. Hence the first big perceived advantage of Amazon such as better quality and lower price no longer holds for many classes of products and this situation is only going to get worse for Amazon etc as sites such as Temu will start going after product categories higher up the value chain.

Ukraine Conflict Has Exposed the Mediocrity of Western Weapon Systems

Three decades of deindustrialization has left the West with an inability to build weapon systems at the rate they get consumed in a real armed conflict. This is why Russia can easily make over 5-6 times the number of artillery shells than entire military industrial base of NATO can produce. The same is true for many other consumables from ATGMs, MRLS projectiles, air-defense missiles, tanks, AFVs and much more. It seems the West can’t even rapidly scale up production of its mediocre over-priced weapons because the industrial and skilled manpower base to do so has decayed or was outsourced to China.

Enjoy!