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lachesisdecima

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Hehe. I understand that the way I wrote my comment might have seemed tactless, crude and crass. Apologies.

Please do not misunderstand me. I perfectly understand that people find babies extremely cute. I do too. Hell, if we as a species did not, the both of us would not be here writing comments.

Being a parent is indeed stressful, frightening and tiresome and I am glad that you recognise this fact. I would not know this personally due to the fact that I am not a father. However, I am self aware of my own actions. I have caused stress and fear in my parents. This would be enough to throw a person of any undertaking. However, children are cute; they are bundles of joy and parents view their lives as more complete with kids. If I had any, I would rationalise it the same way as any parent would. "It's my kid. He/She is so cute. Look at it play".

However, parenting does come with an immense cost and people do rationalise their suffering. Pointing that out was the intention of my comment. However, I do not think kids are bad/malicious/horrible. They are great. They just require a lot of upkeep.

Anyway, congratulations on having your kid. Things get a lot less stressful as they age.

  How happy are you? Rate this from 1-10.
Is there any way to quantify emotion? Emotion is subjective and you have to ask people to rate their emotion somehow.
   A good study would ask people twenty years later what the most meaningful and memorable thing they did was, and how important it was to them.
People would then simply rationalise their investment in the children, right? I believe this would be the, "Sunk Cost fallacy". The parents invested so much time and effort into the child. Why would they suddenly denigrate their years of back breaking labour? They would definitely view it in a positive light down the road.

Well I would not be too surprised at this fact. I mean kids are an absolute burden. They require a lot of time and attention. Kids are going to be shitting, crying and whining a lot of the time. All of that will definitely cause a lot of emotional stress to the person. If not for biology, which causes us to make irrational decisions (in a sane world, would anyone torture themselves by having a kid and dumping $245000 on something. It simply is not a good investment), nobody would be having any kids. Kids are a massive emotional, psychological and monetary burden. I caused stress and tension to my parents. If I have any, they will do the exact same thing to me. Nobody should be surprised that this occurs. The scientific study seems to be a tad useless. These are known facts.

I would reckon that the market for personal data is lot bigger. 45 billion e-mails, 10 billion text messages and submit 95 million Tweets are sent in an average day. Now according to this article:

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/528866/researchers-test...

each piece of data is worth about $2. Now, simple maths would tell any company that making money off that data is a lot more profitable than collecting $0.20. Also, how many people would actually want to enrol in such a premium service? It would not be every person that uses Facebook, for sure. Plus, selling off the data is lot easier than soliciting people to buy their premium product (people give them the licence to do so through the ToS).

I would not say that the USSR did not make a lot of progress. It was technologically advanced (through it's use of design bureaus) but the inherent inefficiencies of it's system made it quite impossible to grow after a certain point (economically speaking).

China is playing it smart. It is waving the proverbial carrot in front of the faces of poorer countries in Africa etc. They would gladly support the Chinese coming over to build their infrastructure after being f*ed over by the international (i.e. Western) financial institutions. They are running over to China because it can help them. China can already count on a large base of support from these countries.

The military is going to be used to further this base of support. Being strong means that more people would be inclined to deal with you, knowing that you can accord them protection. The military will play a huge role in increasing the economic might of China.

This will not happen soon. China still has a long way to go. China needs to assume greater control of world finance for this to work. Their new development bank is just firing up. China is still only a major exporter of cheap goods and electronics.