Avast, ye mateys!

Netflix selection is crap anyway!

I guess I’ve forgotten what the problem was exactly. High maternal mortality? How is that not solved by having many redundant wives?

The birth rate of XY babies is actually slightly higher than XX babies. On the other hand, babies with higher testosterone tend to have weaker immune systems and so are more susceptible to infant mortality from disease.

Otherwise, I’m not sure what the problem is with men who don’t have wives? They simply don’t reproduce. Throughout history men have reproduced at a lower rate than women. In polygynous cultures it’s only the very powerful and wealthy men who have many wives. The poor and powerless men have few or none.

High maternal mortality meant that having more than about 7 children per woman was rare. Total fertility rate was about 4.5 to 7 in the pre modern era. Population growth was low due to infant and early childhood mortality though.

If you start having children at age 12, you can have a child every year and reach 7 children by age 20. Without contraceptives, people weren’t having such large multi-year gaps between children like we do now.

Polygyny is where one man has many wives.

There are definitely cultures who have practiced polygyny to get around this issue. Some still do today, for example in many different countries in Africa where people still practice a pastoral life.

If you make $1M in a year from capital gains, just tax it 100% as income.

Capital gains don’t accrue until you actually sell your shares. If you try to tax people like this then they’ll just never sell the shares. Instead, they’ll use their shares as collateral for loans and lines of credit if they need cash.

Extremely high taxes lead to very low tax revenues since people do everything possible to avoid paying them. Conversely, lowering a tax rate can and does increase tax revenue as people start paying the tax instead of trying to get around it (often because the cost of getting around the tax makes it no longer worth it).

What was it like outside of Western Europe?

Love it! Thanks for the laugh!

That’s not a well-founded assumption. The average age of first birth was only 21 as recently as 1970. Go back a few hundred years and it’s way younger than that. Many women throughout history became mothers as soon as they were able (right after the onset of puberty). Many cultures had rites of passage into adulthood for boys and girls of that age. There was no such thing as adolescence.

Could the issue be playing the same seed? Familiarity can sometimes bring carelessness and sloppiness as you rush to get past where you were before.

It’s my main problem. I found it so awful I would never want to watch them again.

Lots of ink has been spilled about the characters and plot and other issues people have with the sequels. For me they’re mostly irrelevant because the physical experience of watching the films is too uncomfortable for me to even think about that stuff.

None of these things ever bothered me when I watched the originals and they won’t bother me despite having been made aware of them by you.

Far more egregious, for me, is the way the sequel series has been edited. The movies have this unrelenting pace of cuts every couple of seconds. It never lets me relax and slowly take in a scene. It’s a completely different style of filmmaking from the original series (which had a lot more long, contemplative shots).

But then I might be a dinosaur here as I see a lot of people complaining about the length of the original trilogy and seeking fan edits to speed up the pace. I have my own personal theory that this is a result of social media (such as Instagram and TikTok) and the way Hollywood has catered to younger audiences and their lack of patience for slower paced films.

I miss slower paced films and I find almost no new films appealing (the most recent one I really enjoyed was No Country for Old Men).

Watch out behind those bushes near the gym, Joe! Jerry’s coming for ya!

Children have been documented to spontaneously invent language.

The whole point is to display your wealth and status for mating purposes.

I’m so happy and surprised to see you bring up IoG! I think the game qualifies as obscure these days since I never see it mentioned outside of SNES retro groups.

It’s my favourite story of any game on the SNES. For those who haven’t played it, it’s a coming of age story about a group of friends travelling together. What makes it so special to me is that although your character (Will) is the only one in the party who does any fighting (you’re not a typical RPG fighting party) your friends are still travelling through some dangerous situations with you. Outside of combat, your character is just another one of the group, albeit the main PoV character for the story.

I love it so much! The story was written by a woman science fiction writer, Mariko Ohara, which I think was pretty rare at the time. I didn’t learn this fact until recently and as a kid I never would’ve known but looking back at it, the game is so much the better for it. The characters just feel so much more like real people than I’m used to from games of that era. Even the Final Fantasy games of that era, as great as they are, have characters that feel more like cartoon characters than real teenagers.

What trash in the originals?

Are you asking why American farmers who want to repair their own stuff don’t switch to European equipment?

All the parts would be in metric!

Another disadvantage is that it can’t have an enchantment.