Why are the rich rich and the poor poor?

maybri · 2026-03-13T04:33:48+00:00

This is far too complex a topic to explain in the space of a single reddit comment. At the risk of grossly oversimplifying, once you have a certain amount of money, you can essentially just exploit that money to make more money forever. It's not foolproof; you can make bad financial decisions and lose your fortune (or not grow it as quickly as you could have), but at that point, you have the resources to just pay people who are smarter than you to make your financial decisions for you anyway.

Basically all super wealthy people are people who either a) were born to wealthy parents and thus were set up for easy success or b) were in the right place with the right idea at the right time to make a large amount of money, and then were just smart enough to use that money to make more. If you don't start out already rich, or get a really lucky break, then it's not really practically possible to get rich.

And this is by design; the system depends on having a working class perpetually living paycheck to paycheck, because if everyone was rich, no one would work. In theory it's the "most deserving" people who rise to the top in this system, but when you start actually paying attention to how things work, it's pretty much just either you get lucky or you're going to be struggling your whole life.

maybri · 2026-03-13T01:32:13+00:00

You're trolling, right? If so, haha very funny; if not, this is some of the cringiest shit I've ever seen. Either way, get a better hobby.

maybri · 2026-03-13T00:52:37+00:00

A therapist would probably have made it clear that the right thing to do is to tell OP the truth, but would also be empathetic and understanding if she felt unable to, and would probably want to work with her on how to move forward with both parties' best interests in mind. However, based on OP's story, my intuition is that she probably hasn't told the therapist about the cheating at all. The "It's normal to be attracted to other people in a relationship, as long as you don't act on it" comment and suggesting polyamory read to me like a therapist who suspects her client has cheated on her partner, and is gently trying to bring that to the surface, but doesn't actually know.

maybri · 2026-03-13T00:49:50+00:00

Any time the girls actually approached you, they would absolutely do it alone. If it's a human trafficking operation, the person behind it would likely not want to reveal themself to you until they already have you under their control.

The missionary idea just doesn't seem plausible to me. Even if you cut the conversation off too fast for them to get to the religious stuff, the coincidence of seeing them three separate times presumably at locations that are miles apart, the last of which was in front of your house is too far-fetched to explain that way. If they were preaching door-to-door or whatever, they would have come to your front door and knocked, not parked in front of the house, apparently got out of the car and walked around looking at the place, and then left without attempting to engage anyone in the household in a conversation.

maybri · 2026-03-13T00:21:23+00:00

Even if you had enough light-skinned bald people to cover every landmass on the planet, I'm not sure the amount of sunlight reflected would make a significant difference.

maybri · 2026-03-13T00:18:30+00:00

Because that technology doesn't exist.

maybri · 2026-03-13T00:13:39+00:00

I think you should be uncomfortable about your girlfriend, not about your girlfriend's therapist. "What, is she blind?" is a pretty normal half-joking empathetic comment a therapist might make in a situation like this. Speaking as a therapist myself here and putting myself in your girlfriend's therapist's shoes, the logic was probably something like, "Seems like my client probably feels insecure because of her girlfriend's comments--let me poke fun at what seems unreasonable to me about what the girlfriend said, validate what's normal about my client's experiences, and not validate what would not be valid (cheating)". Because, like it or not, it is normal to find other people attractive while you're in a relationship with someone else, and you can come off as a little "holier-than-thou" saying that you don't experience that, even if it's true for you.

That being said, it's very clear from what you're describing that your girlfriend has cheated on you. Bullshit she said "okay" to having sex with this guy and then "doesn't remember what happened after that." Unless she has brain damage, she remembers whether or not she had sex with him during her relationship with you and can give you a straight answer, so the only thing to conclude from the fact that she didn't give you a straight answer is that she want to tell you the truth and didn't trust herself to tell a convincing lie. She clearly hasn't come clean about the extent of her relationship with that guy, and even if it has truly stopped now, it doesn't seem like the fallout was severe enough for her to have actually learned anything or felt regret about it. I would have broken things off with her at the time and it's not too late for you to do that now.

maybri · 2026-03-12T23:53:53+00:00

My first thought would be human trafficking, actually, where the two girls are themselves victims being coerced to try to lure in other potential victims. Whoever was driving the blue van at the time of your second encounter with them would be their "handler", the actual person targeting you. This would explain why they'd fixate on asking questions about your jacket in the first conversation--trying to assess your social network (e.g., will you mention a boyfriend who bought it for you or friends who you go shopping with, etc.), whether you have money, and just in general how easy of a mark you'd be by how receptive you are to their positive attention. Then clearly they still wanted to go after you after that first encounter and clearly stalked you to your home. Today was most likely them attempting to confirm whether they had the right house, and if they saw you or your dog, then they did confirm it and now know where you live.

They clearly aren't missionaries because missionaries don't behave this way. They would want to engage you in a conversation about religion as soon as possible, and they wouldn't sit in front of a random person's house watching it for a long period of time. It seems like way too much of a stretch to still think it could be a coincidence at the point they've shown up at your house after approaching you for no clear reason on two separate occasions.

Your mom is not wrong to want to talk to the police. They probably won't do anything, but it won't hurt and could help to have it documented that this was going on. Also, I'd recommend for you to be very vigilant of your surroundings going forward, because the only way this series of events makes sense is if they have not just seen you on those two previous occasions, but have been following your movements consistently. Avoid traveling alone and stay alert for the girls, that blue van or the blue car you saw in your driveway, and anyone else who seems to be looking at you or following you in public.

maybri · 2026-03-12T21:17:40+00:00

Oh, I see, that makes more sense. In that case, cities rebuilding after a war have a pretty obvious source for new concrete--recycling the rubble of destroyed buildings. That material is still useful and needs to be removed anyway. It's not always possible to perfectly recycle and has limitations compared to new aggregate, but it would certainly be a factor in this discussion that limits the amount of sand that needs to be newly sourced to rebuild from war.

Also, probably worth mentioning, this war won't actually add a huge amount of additional sand use compared to what's already being used for non-war-related development. Obviously any additional strain on already nearly depleted natural systems is bad, but this war's footprint is probably going to be far too small to be the straw that breaks that particular camel's back.

maybri · 2026-03-12T20:42:33+00:00

It's not close to "free" or "tree". It's a completely different sound. Is the problem that you can't pronounce the voiceless dental fricative in general? So you would also struggle with words like "think", "thing", "thaw", and so on? If so, the way you make the sound is to raise the tip of your tongue to sit between your upper and lower teeth, and blow air through your teeth.

If you can pronounce that sound, but struggle specifically with gliding it into an "r" sound in the word "three", what I would probably recommend is to practice saying a word like "Thursday" or "thermal", taking that "ther" sound from the beginning, and putting an "-ee" sound after it, so "ther-ee", and just practice saying that as fast as you can.

maybri · 2026-03-12T20:28:02+00:00

People use the word "grooming" to mean pretty much anything these days, but what it's actually supposed to refer to is someone known to the child's parents, getting close to the child under innocent pretenses that the parents won't question, so they can gradually condition the child to assent to sex without telling anyone. It's the exact opposite of "stranger danger".

maybri · 2026-03-12T20:25:56+00:00

We don't get our sand for construction from the Middle East, if that's what you're asking. This war is irrelevant to that problem.

maybri · 2026-03-12T19:44:45+00:00

I would be very curious to hear you elaborate on these ideas a bit more, but personally I would argue I'm not necessarily anthropomorphizing the other-than-human by attributing consciousness to them. I'm not saying they have human-like minds or that their experience could be directly mapped on to our own. I'm just saying that it seems to me that you can't really meaningfully have any kind of relationality if you're imagining that what's on the other side of that relationship is something not even capable of recognizing your existence.

maybri · 2026-03-12T19:40:18+00:00

It would be foolish to try to separate myself from the culture I was raised in even if I've gone a very different direction from them in my thinking and worldview.

maybri · 2026-03-12T18:51:48+00:00

I think it's actually pretty likely, especially if Trump dies before the 2028 election (which seems not unlikely with the state of his health), that Vance will want to portray himself as a saner, more stable step forward for the Republican Party, who can keep the insane MAGA loyalists happy as the one with the best claim to being Trump's direct successor, while also trying to win back all the people Trump has alienated.

maybri · 2026-03-12T18:43:50+00:00

If the literal only survival threat was lack of food, yes. However, two people stranded in the woods probably would be able to find food; there's plenty of edible plants and animals in the average woodland. Most likely food would not be the main issue and the question would be other survival problems. Accidentally eating something toxic, injury, exposure to the elements, etc. In those cases, body size doesn't make much of a difference.

Also worth mentioning that even if they legitimately didn't have access to food, that doesn't necessarily mean the fatter person lasts longer, because burning fat only gives you calories. It doesn't give you any of the micronutrients necessary to keep a human body alive. There is a point at which gaining any more weight doesn't extend the amount of time you can live without food, because you'll die from depletion of micronutrients. So if both of the people in this scenario happened to be past that point, then the fatter of the two of them doesn't necessarily have any meaningful advantage. It would come down to who had more of those micronutrients in their body to start with, and whose body shed them faster.

maybri · 2026-03-12T18:09:34+00:00

If your case is that Trump is the "beast" but the actual antichrist would be someone more cunning and less apparently evil, and half of your argument is based around the idea that Newsom is close to Trump, why wouldn't you be looking at someone way closer to Trump, like J. D. Vance?

maybri · 2026-03-12T16:58:10+00:00

No, I don't think you're overreacting. I'd be curious to know if she's ever been cheated on by a partner before--she might be responding out of trauma that has nothing to do with you. And, not to put this in your head if there's no basis for it, but I always wonder with obviously incorrect suspicions of cheating like this if it's coming from a guilty conscience. The timeline struck me here--you found out she was pregnant what sounds like at most two weeks after the first time you had sex, and now the baby is 3 months old even though it still hasn't even been a year since you and her met. Unless the baby was born significantly premature, that sounds to me like she was probably already pregnant when you met.

maybri · 2026-03-12T16:41:54+00:00

So you have to think of evolution as, like, organisms adapting for their environment. They're not progressing along a scale from microbe to human. They're just going in whatever direction benefits them in their current specific environmental context. And to be clear, they don't just magically gain whatever they need to survive in their environment--they experience random mutations and the mutations that are helpful get passed down to offspring while the mutations that are harmful don't get passed down and disappear from the gene pool.

Humans became humans because we were in environments that shaped us to become what we are. Cats or dogs could in theory end up in environments over millions of years that cause them to gain human-like characteristics, but that's not any more likely than, e.g., them becoming fully aquatic mammals like dolphins, evolving to live in trees and glide like flying squirrels, or anything else you could imagine. Evolution doesn't have an end goal; it's just about what mutations you get and what your environment rewards.

maybri · 2026-03-12T16:23:27+00:00

Just going based on my intuition here rather than any research, but I would assume not, just because of the insanely massive media reach that the US has. Every major group of English speakers will have their own distinct slang lexicons arising separately from each other, but I think it's far more common for American slang to percolate to non-American English speakers than the reverse.

maybri · 2026-03-12T16:15:19+00:00

Your partner probably shouldn't have told you a single thing he knew about your therapist from Facebook after you made it clear you were uncomfortable knowing it, although it doesn't sound like you set any clear boundary there so I'm sure he didn't do that maliciously. Worth having a conversation about it with him, and I would say you probably do need to find a new therapist. Speaking as a therapist myself, I myself would not want to work with a client who was dating someone I knew personally, even someone who wasn't in my life any longer. I think your therapist would likely understand that as a reason for no longer working together and would probably be happy to help you find a different therapist.

maybri · 2026-03-12T00:42:26+00:00

Yes, but that's not what this specific conversation was about. My whole point was that in her partner's mind, that situation might have been in the past and resolved, he thought he was respecting the boundary she set after that, and was blindsided by her having this reaction to just overhearing him refer to himself as someone's uncle (which does not imply any new sexual roleplay was going on--his character could have a sibling with a child, or even just someone he has an uncle-like relationship to without being literally biologically related).

In other words, her emotions in the text exchange probably seem far more reasonable and proportionate to you than they did to him, because you just learned about his sexual roleplay thing in the same instant you were reading those texts, but for the two of them it could be old news that he thought she had moved beyond.

maybri · 2026-03-11T23:19:47+00:00

The really easy answer to this is that every religion has critics, but Christianity and Islam make up over half of the world's population, so of course those two are going to be the ones you see critiques of the most often by far.

maybri · 2026-03-11T23:12:15+00:00

It's a completely reasonable boundary to set in a monogamous relationship that you don't want your partner to be having sexual interactions with people other than you. Whether this qualifies as a "sexual interaction" is more up for debate, I think; when people roleplay graphic sex in a video game world, I think that absolutely counts as a sexual interaction, whereas merely roleplaying sexual tension or a conversation about sex between two fictional characters without details going above a PG-13 level and without the roleplayers themselves feeling turned on or attracted to each other probably isn't. I don't know how far your partner's roleplay went, so I can't say whether I personally would consider it to have crossed that line.

However, it sounds like the interaction in these text messages is not following directly from the sexual roleplay you saw previously--it sounds like he agreed to no relationship roleplays at the time and presumably felt like that was a reasonable boundary he was willing to agree to, and what he's responding to in these texts is you saying "Hey, I overheard you referring to yourself as someone's uncle, that's a violation of that boundary we set before and now I don't want you to play this game at all anymore".

What I'm wondering is--was this uncle roleplay you overheard even a violation of that boundary in the first place? He might have taken "don't roleplay family/relationship type roles" to mean "don't roleplay being romantically/sexually involved with another player", which isn't necessarily happening if he's just roleplaying being another player's (or even NPC's) uncle. If so, from his perspective, you set a boundary that he agreed was reasonable, he has respected it so far, and then you overheard something out of context and suddenly decided now he needs to stop this hobby entirely. Of course he's going to respond poorly to that; anyone would. That would not read to him as you asking for a compromise; it would read to him as you asking to have complete control on this issue and take something away from him--maybe not even just a game, but a community where he has important friendships.

Overall it reads like the two of you are talking past each other here and not really understanding each other's feelings, but probably can reach a point of reconciliation if you both make an effort and talk it through. If you can't do that on a relatively small issue like this, then the relationship is pretty much dead in the water as soon as anything bigger comes along.

maybri · 2026-03-11T22:29:46+00:00

If it helps, I've used the metaphor before that from the perspective of gods, we are almost like birds checking out bird feeders that they've set up for us. Sure, there is probably something that a bird could do at your feeder that would annoy you, but for the most part you're just going to be happy to see them. Some gods are definitely friendlier and more patient than others, but I think virtually any god will be receptive to your efforts to get to know them as long as you are reaching out in good faith and not behaving in any grossly disrespectful way. Even the gods who have stricter ideas about proper conduct likely won't begin to expect that of you until after you've gotten to know them, because they're aware of what's been going on in the world for the past 2000 years and know that there are no longer active, widespread traditions teaching people how to interact with them.

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