JMA-PSOS

I just finished watching One Child Nation and a few things stood out:
1. As the narator (Nanfu) astutely observed, US abortion restrictions and China's abortion enforcement are truly the same thing: exerting control over women bodies.
2. As China shifted from their One-child policy (1979-2015) to a Two-child policy and more recently to a Three-child policy, I thought that maybe they should just simplify the whole process and stop wasting brain power by simply having a periodic draw in which they pick a number between 0 and 3 that will decide how many children each family can have and once a family has their first child they get locked in at that year's draw? If the drawn number is not whole, they can either round up or down, and/or randomly pool together multiple families and let them decide how to trade amongst them the fractional parts or create a market for fractional parts (e.g. if draw reveals 1.3, group three families which would be allowed a total of 4 kids, or if the drawn number is 0.25, then four families would be allowed only 1 child total). Of course, if a multiple birth exceeds the quota, they would have to give away the extra kid(s) to a well-moneyed desperate Western family that was very deserving.</s>
3. Some of the stories were harrowing, e.g. Peng Wang's discarded fetuses or the 2011 story about the Duans, the abandoned baby girls and the orphanage networks that adopted out thousands of possibly abducted babies, a story picked up by the NY Times.

Russia is a perfect example of mass opinion manipulation and the war in Ukraine is perfect litmus test to underscore this sad truth.

Edit: Some may note that China is a very strong contender for that top spot, and, in general, large polities have a very high correlation with opinion manipulation and self-delusion (e.g. UN, India, USA, EU, Brazil, IMF, WB, other supranational orgs). The side effect of these artificialities is of course jerky and often unpredictable self-corrections after long periods of drifting, similar to mean reversion processes. Perhaps, not unsurprisingly, the stock market exhibits and shares very similar divergent/convergent processes and cycles (at micro and macro levels) with our largest polities.

The Snapchat boss opined on China's rise. I have two comments on that:
1. Government heavy investment in infrastructure and research does pay off.
2. Minimal economic drag from short-term return spending (e.g. outsized military spending, heavy and growing rent seeking sectors such as govt, lawyers, lobbyists, police, hedge funds, banks, general middlemen layers that add little value) has a multiplier effect.

I dreamt about an interaction with the pope of which I remember two scenes:
1. I went into a heavily fortified castle in which I met a bunch of armoured guards and an armoured very rotund pope. They all had round helmets with 2+ ft long pole atop their helmets with a small cross on top. The pole length varied.
2. A cardinal taking a bath was whipping someone trying to extract some secrets. Also, a jet of water was continuously hitting the captive washing away the blood of his whipped back.