You think I didn’t ask her if she wanted help and make the decision with her? She’s a strong woman and perfectly capable of speaking for her self. Her parents were also over and her mom was helping out. But the reality was that she was fine on her own. That was 18 years ago and the first of three kids. She’d tell you the same thing.

I scheduled two weeks off for the birth of my first child. Not paternity leave, just vacation time. My wife became a SAHM a few months before. I was bored and went back to work after 1 week. I couldn’t imagine 12 weeks.

The kid is just not doing that much. Feed, poop, change, sleep. And the child doesn’t recognize you at that stage. It’s all stimulus response. If he was crying and I picked him up, he didn’t care. I got zero emotional reward for the interaction with the child. Emotional bonding all happened around 3 months old and beyond. Before that the benefit was more in the shared experience with my wife of learning how to take care of a newborn. But really, it’s not that hard, and after one week it was old hat.

Are you guys idiots? The republicans are already fucking up the government, cutting left and right without regard to laws and congress. So you want the democrats to shut the government down to protest … what exactly? How does this help? This basically takes the narrative that fucked up government programs are now the D’s fault when the R’s are currently 100% in control.

Too many people here are like kids just wanting to break things. I’m pissed too, but shutting down the government would be the stupidest thing Schumer can do right now. The R’s don’t care if you shut down the government. They’d be happy. They’d then blame all the liberals for social programs that wouldn’t be funded and broken things. If you want to negotiate and play hardball, find something they care about and use that. This aint it.

Logically you would think the answer should be that money shouldn’t matter much, but it always seems to. It’s still a way of keeping score and a proxy for power. They’ve always longed for more money/power and as they get older and their brain slows down, they don’t suddenly change. What old billionaire have you seen says “you know what? I’m going to give everyone raises! I don’t need more money! We should all be happy together!” (Almost) never happens. They want more and more and more… and then they die.

Okay, here’s my conspiracy theory…

Now let’s say you’re Trump and the supreme Court has said it’s just about impossible to convict somebody of corruption in the US. You see that you’re going to be elected president and your goal is to figure out how to make a crap ton of money off being present. Now you can do the boring old s make dignitaries stay at your hotel thing or have foreign governments. Give Jared kushner a bunch of money… But that’s all pocket change. If you’re president, you can crash the economy. If you know a bunch of Rich Russian oligarchs who can short the market and you can tell them exactly when the market will crash then they can make billions… And you can get your cut too.

This is why Trump doesn’t really give a shit why the tariffs are in place. That’s why he makes up bullshit answers when asked why the tariffs are implemented. He doesn’t care. … But he really really really wants to yank the market around. First he says tariffs happening, then he says they’re not, then they’re happening again. Every time the market goes up and down he can make a shit ton of money if he can accurately predict when it goes up or down.

I can’t get this idea out of my head. It makes more sense than anything else I can come up with. There’s so much money to be made if you have the power to yank around the u.s. economy and enough narcissism to not give a shit about the people hurt in the process.