Image Description: A digital meme divided into two main panels: a mathematical whiteboard explanation at the top and a reaction image at the bottom. Top Panel (The Whiteboard): Titled “P-ADIC FINANCE where p = profit.” It explains a fictional financial system using real advanced mathematics. Left text: “In this metric, a number’s size is how little profit divides it. The more profitable the crime, the closer its penalty sits to zero. String together ever-bigger crimes and the fines don’t blow up, they converge.” A sequence shows: “p, p^2, p^3, … arrow pointing to 0.” Right chart: A table titled “Crime, Profit, Fine, Fine Size in P-Adic Metric.” It lists crimes: Outsource pollution: Profit = p, Fine = $1M, P-adic size = 1/p (small). Fake the numbers: Profit = p^2, Fine = $10M, P-adic size = 1/p^2 (smaller). Fix the market: Profit = p^3, Fine = $100M, P-adic size = 1/p^3 (tinier). Ruin a country: Profit = p^4, Fine = $1B, P-adic size = 1/p^4 (minuscule). Repeat infinitely: Profit = p^n, Fine = p^n (lol), P-adic size = 1/p^n which approaches 0. Below the chart: A number line showing 0 on the far left (labeled “Where your fines live”) and numbers increasing to the right (labeled “Big in absolute world”). A final box states: “The true crime in a corporate environment is not choosing p.” Bottom Panel (The Reaction): A sepia-toned photograph of a group of wealthy white men in suits, including former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, laughing uproariously together at a gathering. Edited comic speech bubbles are assigned to them: One asks, “Why’d we even need lawyers?” Another laughs, “We just changed the metric lmfao.” A third says, “Fines are for poors.” A man in the foreground laughs, “Infinite money glitch found boys.” In the bottom right corner, a modern internet meme character (a crying, angry “Wojak” in a suit wearing a badge that reads “REGULATORS”) has a thought bubble that reads: “They took us for absolute fools.” Bottom Caption: Superimposed across the bottom in large, bold, white Impact font: “THEY TOOK US FOR ABSOLUTE FOOLS”—a pun on the word “absolute” referring to both being deeply tricked and the standard mathematical “absolute metric.”
Oh, I feel accountable for the deeds of my children, but only up to the point whence they learn to say no.
Actually it reframes it in much better terms: value is subjective based on need, a bottle of mineral water you’d walk into a 7/11 to buy on your way to buy a PlayStation is more valuable than its weight in gold to someone trapped in a gold mine. I’ve seen people who go around gathering cardboard and aluminium soda cans from garbage piles they then sell and exchange for their daily bread. That’s a closed trade loop of sorts, and it’s more honest than banking. A parent’s job is to provide what’s needed, not fulfil wishes. A child needs a phone for communication, they don’t need the latest iPhone with an AI chip to do that. A child needs nutrition, not snacks. Coddling is just as bad as apathy, and both are just as bad as being toxic towards the child.
If every genome capable of spontaneously developing a sophisticated moral framework that recognises what’s wrong with its upbringing refused to pass along those genes, what’s going to have a better chance to reproduce?
Thank you. And yeah, there’s always a correlation, just not where we often think it is. :P
I commend your efforts. And trust me, those people need you and people like you.
Of course. A very basic one, at best without apps. But the point is that there’s no universal rule to help a kid survive (high)school, which often can be very damaging to kids. One wrong step taken, one wrong decision made, one silly error at the wrong time…At my disgusting (in hindsight) highschool the poor got bullied. So everyone tried their best to appear “middle class”. Stupid as fuck, but i heard worse stories from other schools.
Thanks. And yes they do need help. And it’s incredible how many people need help in such a “civilized” nation.
As for your other points: My points made sense, yours made more sense. Hence i retract my initial statement and stand corrected.
I remember being bullied and being called “the genius”, sometimes genuinely by adults, and most of the time sarcastically by other kids. To clarify, the exact alias used was “عبقرينو” (which is the Arabic name for the Disney character Gyro Gearloose), and I used to hate it. It affected my behaviour because I had to mask and adjust my image in order to avoid the moment where I answer questions so thoroughly or ask for clarifications that demonstrate genuine insight that caused my teachers to point me out as an exemplar amongst my classes, because that’s what starts the bullying cycle.
Now here one could argue that bullying is a purely negative experience that should never ever be allowed to happen; or look at this thread and realise how much I’ve been shaped by that experience and see me smiling at this very moment as I reminisce on those days. Both views are valid, and both evoke a different perspective separated by 3 decades. But only the latter considers how life itself can be a teacher, and how it pressed an intelligent vessel into the required shape to hold wisdom.
I do not regret or resent those experiences now. I used to, but not anymore.
I actually experienced the very same. I often deliberately try to act stupid or give wrong answers, just to somehow fit in. Masking is a thing you learn quickly :) The only thing people fear even more than the strange and unknown, is people being smarter than themselves. “Gyro Gearloose” I would’ve taken as a compliment though. Today. Probably not back then, obviously.
Good you took it well, but also this is very anecdotal. We might’ve overcome this, but others break and stay broken. Might it be due to lacking help, lacking reference-frame, lacking whatever. So I wouldn’t really want that for my kid. Not that one has any influence on it, as school is a mighty force parents often cannot barely compete with. It’s 4 decades ago, but I still remember this one guy we bullied hardcore. all day long. all year long. Just because he had poor parents. He basically had the same clothes all year long. What a stupid metric to judge people, but stupid is always majority.
Until it’s not. Until there are more poor but well-educated parents who educate their children in turn.
In Arabic, we have a word with no direct English equivalent: tarbiya (تربية). I think the closest translation might be “custodianship of upbringing,” but it describes the dynamics of learning rather than the mechanics. It’s a bidirectional process (though not everyone will admit that)—it doesn’t just teach children how to solve a specific problem; it teaches them how to develop their own way of tackling an unfamiliar one.