Pardon my poor attempt at being snarky about marriage. I also write that legally it's legally extremely helpful. My comment is about partnership. The views and expectations of modern women have evolved and as you note, most men continue acting from the same frame of view. That's fundamental to whether or not a successful partnership can be made. It's not very surprising that both men and women are struggling to deal with this.

As an aside, because as you point out this discussion is not about "marriage is dumb", one interesting thing that's taken some getting used to in the Nordics is that it's very common to never get married. Couples will live together, have children together, and somewhere in there _maybe_ get married (maybe half of them or so?). There is a legal framework that works for this and it differs a bit whether or not children of come about in the partnership.

I think everyone should give up on marriage. It's a silly tradition with legal implications that can range from extremely helpful to financially catastrophic.

I don't really know what being "grown up" as a man means today or in the past, but a lot of the men I know have never done it. I know guys in their mid 30s who don't think twice about skipping showers for a week, who get in brawls with the homeless after leaving the bar, who are visited by the police a few times a year for getting wasted and causing a domestic disturbance while living in their mother's home, who think cooking on things that aren't a barbecue "is gay". There's a whole separate world of gaming and Discord communities as a lifestyle with totally different perceptions of women as well.

Maybe men aren't naturally "wired" to be office wage slaves or whatever. But there's no reasonable bridge between "screaming at my mother because she's mad I'm unemployed and smoking weed and doing shrooms in her home at age 38 rather than looking for a job" to being a life partner to a woman who feels she's been breaking glass ceilings for 15 years to own her own home.

I simply don't understand how people live out crazy lives like this. Sounds like a Neal Stephenson character. I detest the actions... but just so fascinating that people like this exist. I hope he's Satoshi if only to congeal the plot around crypto.

I like to email. I have never had a problem pursuing a spare thought to a Google'd email address and shipping it out. The response rate is actually high.

Sometimes it's finding and responding to a 10+ year old email thread that I had let die off.

Sometimes it's just for mutual amusement. I have a treasured email thread with with Royal Society where they delicately explained that I cannot elect myself to become a Royal Society Fellow. I think they interpreted it as a naive aspiration to become an Important Scientist.

Some good fun can be had by taking a gander through your spam box and responding. The days of penis growth pills seem to have yielded mostly to phishing analogues and opportunities. I was intrigued by an opportunity to join the Illuminati. I responded and asked what the benefits are.

We are the bearers of new dawns, the guardians of the human species. We are the Pyramid, the Eye, the Light, the Eternal Circle. We are the Illuminati.

we can offer you,wealth,high position in any area of your life either workplace or in politics

we can offer you long life, you will forever be happy, you will be protected by the great Baphomet..

we can offer you a lifestyle that you have been wanting to have, just like those whom

you already hear about on the news and everywhere.

you will have money,fame,power,and you will be happy for all the days of your life,

you will be problem freeman no more worries...

A few emails later I learned that they issue ID cards. Here is what a member of the Illuminati looks like, apparently.

Finally, the Grand Master himself texted me. To proceed they need me to pay an Illuminati membership fee of $150. Who falls for this stuff?

This "exploration" could be promising if it leads to tangible outcomes.

It's sad that even a glance toward making a reasonable change can simultaneously be the inch taken before the mile and a gotcha asserting [in]competence. These guys are so good at being mind viruses.

And it's ironic that potentially positive US food policy changes might come from someone with an anti-vaccine agenda. The frustrating part is that by operating outside of norms he might actually achieve meaningful changes where his predecessors have not.

The anti-vaccine position is just baffling, though. Even if we grant their most extreme claims for argument's sake - some autism, autoimmune conditions, or 5G chips in our bloodstream - that society still functions better than one riddled with preventable diseases and populated by people who aggressively resist basic public health measures like masks during outbreaks. This seems like an incredibly disqualifying position for anyone overseeing public health policy.

Trump's cabinet is half billionaires, half media savvy loyalists. His core competency is a bizarre command of attention and an ability to get away with anything. That also implies being able to do things nobody else can.

Maybe Trump believes in Peter Navarro's ideas, maybe not. It's a knob he can turn, it has tons of powerful people trying to call him when he does, and he can convince half the country that it's all part of his master plan and will work out in the end. These people are driven by faith and will ignore the pain if they think China will hurt and they can keep calling Trudeau governor. Why not create spectacle and leverage while you gut the government? If things get too bad the Fed can just lower rates. What is there to lose?

The billionaire class didn't want Trump. He is a chaos monkey. And I guess it's not quite right to think of the "billionaire class" as a unified class, since there are probably many spheres of influence and interest between their fiefdoms (which span borders).

But they do want things. Trump is uniquely capable of doing those things. Elon Musk is doing those things right now. The Koch Brothers may not like Trump and did not support him directly, but they bankrolled Project 2025. Jeff Bezos may have bent the knee to Trump but he also learned the hard way from MBS that economic and information power only goes so far. Honestly, Zuck's oversized tee shirt and gold chain iteration are a big improvement over the last version.

He probably genuinely thinks he's a genius, but I don't think he cares at all whether tariffs will actually help or not. He completely baffles us all, but at the same time we all know exactly how he works. I claim only that he's a useful idiot to anyone able to get on the phone and have him remember their name.

I guess it's hard to interpret the desires of the billionaire class, but is this not the first time (OK, second, technically) one of them has sat in the US captain's chair? He may be yet another proxy of economic warlords like Musk, Thiel, MBS, and some constellation of Russians, but Trump is not not one of them. Same with his VP and cabinet.

I think Trump is a moron, like anyone reasonable. At the same time I can't help but feel there's something more to all of this.

Congratulations on making it out. I doubt anyone here who remembers your path to West Point would be surprised by your success in that career.

You are already ahead of most veterans I know or knew by having landed a career-trajectory job directly after service. Those who struggled the most thought the best thing to do was to take a break and process it all. In retrospect that is the worst thing you can do. It sounds like you aren't doing that anyway.

The further into the past deployment becomes the easier it is to come to terms with. The good things you've gained from military service are already embedded into your character. That will become more obvious after years of working with folks who have never persevered through the harsh extremes you experience in the military, all at the same time; the attention to detail, physical duress, incredible stress, suffocating fear for your life, the bizarre situations you end up in, etc. You might have to smooth out some of the sharp edges that don't translate well into the civilian world.

I had a weird and difficult ten years after leaving service. Eventually I got my act together and earned graduate degrees in both mathematics and computer science. I got a job as a software engineer in Norway a few years ago. I met and married my wife here. Last year we bought a house in northern Norway (Tromsø northern, but more rural than that). I forced my employer to allow me to work remotely; when I go to the office it's a 1.5 hour commute by boat. My backyard is wilderness and I am able to live in peace now.

War is an unfortunate staple of the human experience. Be glad you experienced it, and be glad most of the people you'll be around going forward have not.

I've found LLMs mildly useful and interesting. I fail to see how burning millions of barrels of oil so that LinkedIn can help me write my thank you post in LinkedIn prose when I'm laid off is a good use of resources with ROI or revolutionary. Where is the business case in the first place?

Checking in. I take a gander here every few months. It's nice to see that this place continues on. Lurking is my lot, though.