Or is it season 2? If you treat the split cour as all being part of one slightly delayed season. . .
Well, either way, there's more Honzuki coming. That's great. It will probably be another small 12 episode dollop, which won't actually move the episode count much, but every little bit helps. Next time I adjust my rankings I'll have to uprank it yet again.
Since Honzuki was on my anime wishlist, now that my wish is granted, I had to delist it and put in a replacement. I went with long wishlist veteran Futari Ecchi, a wish which of course will never be granted due to censorship laws. But my wishlist is aspirational not practical.
The future of anime is really good. So long as covid-19 doesn't keep delaying things, there's a plethora of promised hits coming. Utawarerumono, Love Live!, Bleach, Idolm@ster, Honzuki, Shingeki no Kyojin, Boku no Hero Academia, it's endless.
For a while I was pretty glum about anime's future. I thought once SAO and Railgun ended only a vast desert would remain. But all these recent new announcements have transformed that vision into Elysian fields. It could always be better. We aren't getting awesome years like 2009 where stuff like Code Geass and Clannad were airing simultaneously anymore. But it could also be much, much worse. Compared to western art which never releases anything worth watching, Japan's doing fine.
Work is not a good replacement for family life because most work is mind-numbingly pointless drudgery. For instance, an article recently came out saying de-boning robots could do the job almost as well as human hands, only resulting in 1% more waste per chicken. In Europe they've already switched to robots, but of course in America we favor illegal immigrants drudging away for pennies of additional profit.
Meat packing is a clearly vital job, what could be more beneficial to Americans than feeding them highly nutritious, tasty food? But when you actually investigate the issue it turns out machines could be doing it with barely any human supervision and everyone working at said job is just wasting their time.
It's the same in all fields. If the job is important, like farming or construction or trucking, it turns out a robot can do that. There aren't any scientific reasons why we aren't already using robot drones to harvest apples, we just choose not to do it for dumb reasons mostly involving cheap immigrant labor. We are at a point in time where anything that doesn't require heavy thought can be automated, and all stone age technologies like housing and farming don't require heavy thought, almost by definition by the fact that stone age humans were capable of doing them. Which means all basic human needs, the really important jobs, properly belong in the hands of machines now.
After that comes higher-order-thinking jobs, but they're pointless for an entirely different reason. Almost all of these jobs don't produce any value, they're parasitic. Lawyers, bankers, insurance salesmen, advertisers, bureaucrats, whatever. Their entire job is to con other people into giving them resources and in return you get nothing but flimflam and lies. It's an illusionary sector of the economy that trades only in illusions. If you put a magnifying glass to any of these job fields and ask, 'why is this field necessary?' The answer is stupefied blank expressions and hand-waving. "Why do we have all these social workers? Couldn't we give everyone a basic income and let them buy whatever they needed on the private market much more efficiently?" That's about 10 million federal workers with blank expressions on their face right there.
Obviously it isn't fulfilling to do mindless drudgery that any machine can do just as effectively. That's no different from picking up rocks and moving them from point A to point B, like some sort of prison detail.
Likewise no one in their heart can be fulfilled with the life of a conman. They must eventually realize how phony and pathetic, how completely pointless their work is to the quality of people's lives. They don't deliver anything tangible at all. And nobody in their right mind will ever respect them for it.
Okay, but then there's hyper-order-thinking jobs, which aren't con-jobs and aren't drudgery. Now we're up to the level of politicians, journalists, artists, scientists, and CEO's. You're making an enormous, potentially beneficial, impact on millions or billions of people. People love you for it. You can make your mark in history. And how many people does this include? 100,000 all told in the entire country? It's nice work, if you can get it.
I'm one of those artists/journalists and I love my job, but I've never made a big impact with either. I can't make any money out of it. It's fine to be an 'aspirational hyper-order-thinker,' but most people will either get dispirited once they've failed for too long or run out of money and have to get a real job.
How many scientists have invented anything meaningful in their life? Aside from the internet and improved transistors I can't point to any difference, technologically, between when I was born and now. Maybe HD flat screen tv's, but come on. The content of a show is far more important than how big the screen its shown on, and people were watching HD wide screen movies all the way back in the 1920's.
There are certainly lots of cool inventions that could be made, like the cure to various diseases, fusion power or self-driving cars. I keep hearing all these things are about to happen, but they never do.
In any event, even if you add in all the scientists working on breakthrough technologies that will eventually succeed, how many people is that? 100,000? Maybe?
One job that could be genuinely useful and rewarding for the masses is 'soldier.' There are so many worthwhile wars to be fought out there, so many evil people we should be slaughtering, so much land we could be conquering and improving. Potentially the entire male populace could be recruited as soldiers and every single one of them would be doing something meaningful with their lives.
But our politicians are in control and the only wars they let soldiers fight are meaningless, self-defeating 'police actions' that inevitably result in defeat. Ever since the Korean War America hasn't let their soldiers win at anything. I can't think of a more depressing job than sitting around pointlessly in Afghanistan for now the 20th year in a row. All we have to do is slaughter the Taliban wholesale, by the millions, with our overwhelming firepower, and the war would be over in a jiffy. But nooooooo. The politicians tell us we must win the 'hearts and minds' of known evildoers. (How exactly do you do that other than by catering to their evil?) So of course we lose. When you set impossible victory conditions and impossible rules of engagement, go figure there is no more despairingly pointless job than soldier.
We wouldn't even have to wander abroad to find useful activity for our soldiers. We could go house to house killing all known thugs and gangsters in our own inner cities and provide a wonderful boon to the country. Right now thugs are murdering each other at accelerated rates due to the police drawdown. I rejoice at every single one of their deaths and roll my eyes at the conservative publications wringing their hands at the black-on-black murder rate. Every single black who dies before November is one less Biden voter to worry about. What's not to love?
But blacks aren't efficient or effective at anything, even killing each other. If we let the army join in on the carnage we could get those numbers up way, way higher. Think of all the prime real estate we could open up for sale in New York City, Chicago, and Washington D.C.!
But noooooo. The one mass employment program we could actually achieve something with is totally banned because of our squeamish, womanly embrace of pacifism. We can't hurt the poor little angels with rap sheets of over 100 felonies. Instead we need to give them some more 'programs' which I'm sure will work like all the previous 'programs' have.
So perhaps you can have a fulfilling job if you belong to the top million Americans (and I'm being generous here.) That leaves 332 million other Americans with basically nothing to do. With mandatory marriage and children, we could give back a fulfilling, meaningful life to these 332 million, the 99.9%.
Parenting is a meaningful, full-time occupation, which any stay-at-home mother can attest to. The more children you have, the more parenting you can do, the more fulfilling work to do. It's also a job that machines are absolutely unsuited for. It involves communication, emotion, and a constantly changing array of tasks. I'm offering actually fulfilling labor to 99.9% of Americans, something none of them are getting at their jobs.
With the citizen's dividend they could afford it, too. Which is why I've always counseled for both laws to be instituted simultaneously.
It's also absolutely necessary in an age of halving birth rates. If we don't replenish our ranks we'll be overwhelmed by foreign invaders and die out entirely.
Both fathers and mothers have important roles to play for children. They could both work at having and raising children all day and see visible, positive results from their actions every day. A return on investment you'll never see from advertising Cheerios.
There's no job more important than producing the next generation. Suppose you could invent fusion power. Okay, but what if you instead had two children equally as brilliant as you, and one of them invented fusion power and the other cured cancer. You'd still be better off just having children.
Of course this is doubly true for anyone stuck in a meaningless dead-end job. Your job is pointless, but if you have children maybe they could make something of their lives. So why not entrust things to them and reroll the dice?
This isn't even mentioning how fulfilling it is to have a soulmate in your life with whom you can share anything and be appreciated and understood thereby. Intimacy is wonderful, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. External validation, the chance to fully express yourself, the ability to make others deeply happy and receive their gratitude in return, there are so many treasures that will forever remain buried in your soul until you experience romantic love. Loving each other can't be a full-time job because it would be like two mirrors set to reflect each other lacking any light to reflect. There must also be sources of inspiration from outside such that there's grist for the mill. (In my utopia most of that grist would be the daily intake of artistic masterpieces and the daily growth of your children). But reflecting on daily events alongside a lover is infinitely more rewarding than doing so alone -- or not reflecting on anything at all (the hedonist's path).
Marriage and children is the only way 99.9% of Americans will ever be graced with a meaningful life. Supposedly 43% of Millennials are married and 55% of Millennial women have children, but I doubt it's the right kind of marriage and children I'm dreaming of.
A lot of these marriages are between two old people who aren't very attractive anymore with little passion to speak of. Their bond would have been much more potent and loving if they had started as teenagers. This is why virtually all romance stories are about high schoolers.
Likewise, we aren't talking about bustling homes full of siblings playing with each other. We're talking about single child (often single-parent) homes where said parents are at work full-time and no one ever talks to each other. The house is just a giant cavern where the kid comes home to do homework before falling asleep. Maybe fifteen minutes of conversation ever actually occurs between parent and child, and most of that will be acrimonious accusations by the parent that the child isn't doing X chore or Y school assignment well enough.
No thank you. That isn't fulfilling at all. What I'm talking about is parents home schooling their children, teaching them the correct moral values, imparting all the golden art of the world drip by drip in line with their rising intelligence, while lots of siblings constantly play together and chat between themselves. It's an order of magnitude more family life than the pitiful displays of today.
And for the 57% of Millennials who aren't married and the 45% without children, obviously mandatory marriage and children would completely revolutionize their lives for the better. That's a lot of unhappy people we could be helping right off the bat.
There's this strange line of thinking that we aren't in crises, that nothing needs to change, that the 'free market' is allocating people's time wisely, and the only people suffering in America are idiots who didn't avail themselves of endless opportunities, so to hell with them. The statistics simply do not match this worldview.
Suicide is up dramatically since 30 years ago. Ditto overdoses. Ditto depression. Ditto the ranks of the unmarried and without issue. The birth rate is at an all time low. I'm not just making all these problems up. What I'm hearing is equivalent to a doctor saying 43% of my cells are still cancer-free so there's really nothing to worry about.
Oh, okay, if 43% of the body-politic is still healthy I guess there's nothing to worry about. . .
NO! THAT'S CALLED TERMINAL STAGE CANCER!
If idiots were just being idiots there wouldn't be such a dramatic change in negative trend lines. It would be the same as ever, the same as it has always been across history. There were always crazy people and village idiots. But they were never the majority of your country! That's new!
The situation is completely and totally out of hand. People can feel it in their bones. Half of America is on various pills just to get through their day. Drastic problems require drastic solutions, work at a chicken deboning facility just doesn't cut it.
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