A piece of cake

M : So few people understand what being rich is.
s : What's being rich?

Me : Owning the person that makes the best cake.
s : The chocolate goose?

Me : Ha. People imagine it's whatever, "I'm rich enough to afford flying to Mars!!1". Fine, go ahead. Why would anyone bother is beyond me. Just like any beach only too hot, no hotels and no women.ⁱ
s : It makes us happy to make you good things.

Me : And then those people with their "Oh, well maybe you have a slave I could be interested in : ."
s : "Could perhaps!"

Me : Yeah, perhaps even. This is why pimping doesn't work. If you don't like the girls, what're you doing with them? And if you do like them, why are you sending them off?
s : Well it's to make money, no?

Me : You can't make money without a relationship. This is what drove you nuts with GAFⁱⁱ, you were making money and in so doing ended up in this completely unwanted relationship.
s : Yeah. ...but maybe if you kept the girls on enough drugs? Then it'd be like having a relationship, not with a human really, but more like, I dunno, a cat.

Me : Eh. The problem there is the cost of a drug habit easily outdoes the potential profit involved.ⁱⁱⁱ
s : Oh, yeah, it would huh. So then why do people do it?

Me : Why. It's spam, they do it 'cause they've seen other derps doing it so it must make money! Stan has a good mental model for this. Imagine you've got a mine, and you seal it up so people can't get out. You don't feed the miners, which means they will necessarily die, but before they do that for a little while they're going to keep on mining.
s : ...? Do they know it's been sealed? Okay, okay.

Me : They're going to keep on mining for a little while, during which while your mine essentialy is powered on biodiesel, as stored around their viscera and wherever. In any case for as long as you keep adding fresh people fuel canisters, you've got a working mine. It does not work for any one miner, of course, but that doesn't mean it's not still a perfectly functional and serviceable mine.
s : Aha.

Me : And this explains a variety of things that exist despite not working. Like the Socialist United States. I mean, who's it benefitting? Not the mayor of New York. Not Obama. Not any of the numerous anon derps it claims to be servicing. Nobody, really, yet still it trudges on. Presidents get inaugurated looking 38 and eight years later they're about on par with McCain, 175-198 yo sort of thing. This has been going on for decades, but there's no shortage of idiots willing to trade a little fat for a little "recognition", a few years off their life for a few weeks inside a dream, stuff like that.

1. This references an earlier discussion, in which I pointed out the Moon would make an excellent symbol of the general infertile failure of feminism, seeing how it remains so far unstained by the slimy marks she-astronauts (astronautettes ?) would leave behind if they had no legs. And were naked. Or something. [↩]
2. Horrible, horrible site. Perhaps the worst design ever. And yet we're still to kill it. [↩]
3. This is probably not directly obvious to you if you're the sort whose only acquaintance with math is arithmetics - another way of saying "if you'd make a horrible businessman". Think of it properly : the cost of a drug habit is an unbound exponential function. The profit of prostitution is a bound log function. [↩]