children


****** BAD REASONS WHY MOST PEOPLE HAVE KIDS ******

Most people don't make a conscious decision to have kids at all. As in, they literally don't even have reasons. When pressed, they just don't pull out. That's the dominant explanation, which isn't, per se, a reason. To the best that impicit language can be translated into formal logic or explicit language, the reason most people have kids is "we're impulsive and we had sex and creampies feel really good." The end; kids get made.

Or kids don't get made, but religion justifies the after-the-fact commitment to the kids. Or if not religion, then they're poor and they can't afford some sort of abortive effort — or they're in a state that just won't let them do that — or the parents are super religious and won't let them do that either.

A lot of people in this kind of setting have kids because of peer pressure. When I was at a gang-heavy high school in 11th grade, it became a fad to get pregnant. Women would congratulate other women on being larger by the month; about two-thirds of my algebra class was pregnant. There were more pregnant women there than not. Read: you were a loser if you weren't getting pregnant, and to feel included more non-pregnant women decided to have kids too. This is how peer-pressure works; If most of your peers get married and had kids under the age of 25, you also will feel like there's pressure to have kids at that age.

I feel like this area of decisionmaking is both the dominating and predominant dumb-person reason. Enough people don't pull out early enough —> other people get married —> they feel FOMO to the couple that didn't pull out —> they imitate that couple at age 23-24-25 —> other couples imitate that couple and so on. If you're in this situation this can create a FOMO cascade, where as you get older you feel as if your options are increasingly constrained.

(But even if you wait, some kind of FOMO cascade will eventually happen; men feel this in their 30s when, as their friends have children, they feel as if they are regarded by peers as a non-central resigned-to-unclehood loser with a hanger-on kind of personality, and women obviously feel this for both biological and social reasons.)

****** THE TRAD LIFESTYLE ******

"Trad" is short for traditional but does not mean traditional in a broad sense. "Trad" is some vague nod to a stereotype of pre-modern ways, and selectively so, because no one is bringing back slavery or axe dueling or refusal to use antibiotics.

I think that the "trad" lifestyle, as advocated for in online US-centric discourse, is just tech dorks who want to creampie 18 year olds who are too young to fully understand how annoying they are yet. This is not unlike if a woman speaks a foreign language and doesn't know how annoying you are in your native language — ideally, your quirks both positive and negative should be understandable to a person you want to spend huge amounts of time with. The trad angle is overthinking child rearing to the extreme; they are not representative of the typical case of person who has children, nor do I think they should be thought of as representative.

Trads are mostly ideologically distanced from the circumstances where people would choose to have kids, and as such should be handwaved. They are imitating a lifestyle that is no longer theirs. They don't know what they're doing. They're, for the most part, men or women with not-like-the-other-girls syndrome, or suburbanites who need a fancier word for "surburbanite" when it's become a dirty or loser-y sounding word among tech workers who associate urban density with success.

If you are a programmer who feels the need to be different from other programmers by making having kids your whole personality, don't. Likewise if you're a maybe-BPD woman looking for an identity by wearing a sundress and hoping a self-concept sticks to you like spaghetti flung to a wall. Please do not bring new people into the world for the sake of finding yourself out.

****** ON RETVRNERS ******

"RETVRN" refers to a more extreme variation of trads who want to, as the name says, "return to tradition." Retvrn is playful or mocking shorthand for this sort of person's mindset. (Note that they often don't have much of an idea of what they are "returning" to, so it's often parodied as men who masturbate to pictures of blonde women in sundresses running through wheat fields.) A reason many retvrners give for having children is some kind of ethnic preservation ethos, and if not ethnic preservation then IQ preservation because they believe that society is facing some kind of systematic IQ decline; under this ethos the ideal combo would be Jewish+Asian, which is not a RETVRN to anything.

If the right-wing RETVRN ethno-nationalists were serious, they'd recognize that trying to out-breed competing ethnicities is a losing numbers game. There are more sensible strategies they could take, but they won't do that. Low-income families trend toward having more kids; this is inevitable. But more kids necessarily means distributed attention. There is a ceiling on how much you can push one kid to full potential when you have four, five, or more children. Humans seem to be able to dedicate ideal modern-society levels of attention to three children at maximum. This means that infrequently-breeding populations can out-attention frequently-breeding populations.

This is obvious to anyone who has ever thought about it. The ethnocentric strategy if you are a <4 child parent is to try to accelerate your children as much as possible through the education system and into powerful careers. (We all know which minorities already do something like this and it's not new commentary. They may achieve similar results but they do it for different reasons, so the analysis here is not fungible.)

So, here's a charitable version of the trad model:

Right-wing ethnodorks would have their best interests served by advocating for a modified version of the nuclear family; specifically one where the man takes on some high-hour high-income career such as quantitative finance or medicine, or perhaps law/business if the degrees are from high tier schools; the woman would by contrast aim to have a Ph.D. and in several senses higher education than the man. This would allow the children to be homeschooled to the middle school level as fast as possible; elementary school in North America is widely regarded as a joke, and middle school is when metrics start counting toward college admission and students can start skipping grades through testing, so advancing to that point as fast as possible is ideal. High income would ensure that even if their proximal public schools are shit, they could find a private school that would satisfy their advancement desires.

(The stock response from people who don't have their own opinions about rapid child advancement is something like "but what about social skills" and I can't see this as anything other than a gigantic cope; not only do many people who say this have abominable social skills themselves, social skills are created by difficult situations that prompt reflection. You don't get those difficult situations from coasting while bored in classes.)

Cognitive decline — as in, yours — matters. Your years between 0-85 are not equal. The reality for people who have paid even a drop of attention to cognitive decline is that there are about 35-45 cognitively useful years that you can really grind on, and after 65 you're unlikely to achieve much. Add childbearing to the equation and your productivity will severely drop past the age you have children. So, if we want to maximize cognitively useful years for the greater good of the preferred ethno-whateverthefuck, rapid childhood advancement is the move.

What I am saying is that instead of beerguttily trying to Alabama themselves back into the majority, white ethno-centrists who are concerned about "the destruction of my race" (or the degeneration of their race, or whatever) should focus on becoming as elite a minority as possible. There is no chance, whatsoever, that they will win the "stay a majority" battle.

This is what their strategy would look like if they were smart. However, they are not.

****** ON "THE FERTILITY CRISIS" ******

As I've said elsewhere, many of you are hypocrites about the fertility crisis so-called. The raised question of course is the fertility crisis *for whom* because, quite obviously, latinas are not having a fertility crisis. The answer is that it's the high IQed among us; no one is talking about the fertility crisis of the lower class. There is an intense arrogance in the term "fertility crisis" when what you really mean is high IQ fertility, and what I think *many of you* mean is fertility among people *like you* — who by the way are not exactly the ideal candidates for society that you think. The concept of masculinity is merely a basket of secondary and tertiary sex stereotypes and pursuing a stereotype on purpose is a joke if not pitiable, but to entertain this for a moment: how can you be so cocky when you yourself are not very fertile? Or are low-T? Or by your own standards not very masculine? Or in various ways so clearly subpar to your own ideal?

(The tactic of redefining masculinity to be a mood or a vibe or whatever you think is cool is new-agey and womanish but more importantly a falsehood. This is not unlike saying ADHD is a mindset. You either have dopamine dysfunction or you don't and you either have high T or you don't and there are known correlates with high T. Some traits are associated with sex stereotypes — e.g. competitiveness with men and kindness with women. This is measurable, and that's the end of the amount of thought worth putting into it when you can pursue traits like kindness and competitiveness a la carte without worrying about whether they fit into a role. Men and especially male writers above one sigma fixated on masculinity scream Male BPD or at the very least identity-dysphoria. Thinking in stereotypes is justifiable in lieu of more accurate concepts and there are more accurate concepts; insisting on continuing is for dipshit normies who don't know any better or people with such poor self-awareness and ability to know who they are that they need someone else to do it for them.)

The futility of save-our-kind movements (has there ever been a successful one?) brings to mind the originators of every purity movement who are themselves partially composed of whatever they're trying to purify. You could argue, yes, that it's not purification, that you believe that you're just further on a spectrum of quality that you want to be proliferated in society, that you just want to raise IQ by some marginal amount or at least keep it stable. But most of you are not that precise.

An irresponsible number of people who care about this — which is more than zero — know next to nothing about IQ testing despite using it as a basis for many of their sociopolitical beliefs. Many of you, if pressed, could not tell me how a WAIS IV scaled score is determined. You could not tell me why intelligence measures are really not that valid past three sigma IQ or why the activity approaches statistical alchemy in tests that claim to measure beyond 160.

An even more annoying strain of this group — and if you are not familiar with this subculture I apologize in advance — beat to death the memes "shape rotator" and "wordcel" and, in spite of the painfully voluminous ocean of strained variations on this joke, nearly everyone seems unaware that the shape rotation meme originates from a mockery of the overgeneralization of what one can infer from rotational ability, specifically the kind of overgeneralization from epistemic fuckboys who read abstracts and not full studies and conclude that, say, spatial rotation explains the gender gap in programming. For that matter, I've only seen one person — who ceilinged the WAIS and does not care about this crap — correctly point out that image rotation is a fractional component of g compared to, say, perceptual ability and "perceptcels" (you are allowed to hurt me for this) are as if not more of a thing than rotators or wordcels. (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-four-stratum-Verbal-Perceptual-Image-Rotation-VPR-model-of-mental-ability_fig1_222550032 and more thoroughly DOI: 10.1016/j.intell.2007.01.005)

If you are unaware of what to do with a "doi:" citation this makes the point for me. There's intense arrogance to believing that you are what needs to be injected into the human vat of lifestream, while looking like the byproduct of a 12 year old who snuck into his dad's liquor cabinet and fucked around with the Skyrim character creator. Doubly so when you have the mental discipline of a literally sophomoric dilettante, or when it's unclear that your personality genetics would translate to someone the rest of the world would want to talk to for more than a few hours.

It's not remotely surprising that the people who complain the most about this tend to be either scarce on details about themselves or pseudonymous grunters with an avatar of a meme of other cartoon. HBD or whatever is not that edgy, and believing this is a distraction from your embarrassment. When pressed to post what makes them hot shit — accomplishments or test scores or physique or face or whatever — they will inevitably retreat to their paranoia about feds or employers or confidentiality agreements, or how you're gay or they're married or... whatever, and even if they do you have zero assurance it's not completely made up. There is accountability in showing who you really are and, more to the point, even if there were a fertility crisis the last people we need solving it are schizos bullied into obscurity by they/them bluehairs. Your case for a fertility crisis would make you look plainly like a bunch of weiners if you were forced to be transparent about yourselves, and you know it.

****** JUST BECAUSE KIDS ARE ESSENTIAL DOESN'T MEAN YOU SHOULD DO IT ******

"I'm continuing the human race 8)"

This is the big one, and it appeals to people who are high on the N scale of the MBTI. Continuing the human race is a big-picture, systematizing-friendly thought.

But it's also facile, right? Yeah, you're continuing the human race, but in what way? Not all genes are equally worthwhile.

Yes, humanity needs children to survive. Humanity also needs janitors to be sane. Yet, you don't see people lining up to work janitorial jobs. People gravitate toward to having children because staying in feels better than pulling out and because the end result is a small adorable person that's half-you.

A shitload of hormones in your body, if you actually have kids, will make you want to feel like having kids is the best decision ever. There will be enormous physiological hindsight bias that convinces you it was worth it. Whatever the outcome, realize how much this biochemistry is influencing your assessment of your life and recalibrate accordingly, as you would when you think a person is pretty when you're drunk, or as you would when you think a person is annoying when you're tired.

"But IQ is hereditary" — I studied cultural evolution in a class in graduate school. Evolving something like lactose tolerance takes hundreds of years; about 500, if I recall, and if I recall incorrectly it's still a shitload. Even if intelligence is extremely hereditary (it is; it's about .75 heritable), the time scale it'll take for mate selection to matter *in any direction* will be so outpaced by biotechnology as to be a piddling afterthought. Genomics Institutes are close to developing sperm sorting that can augment IQ by ~10-15 — one such institute was the Beijing Genomics Insitute and there will be others. It's probably more productive over the next 100 or 200 years to focus on genetic technology, and not so much on whether we have kids period, because if we can develop a solution to increase IQ by 15 points across an entire generation, whatever society implements that is going to win — like, hands down win.

(What society do you think that will be by the way? Like, what country? Do you think it'll be the country that worries about "trad" lifestyles? Do you think this mindset is at all productive for the future?)

Again. Having kids is essential and important, but so is dishwashing. I have been a dishwasher. The essentiality of this role does not mean you should occupy a significant amount of your time washing dishes. This is not snobbish, and I am not saying I am above being a dishwasher. I'm saying **dishwashers themselves** do not want to be dishwashers forever and many would agree with me that this is not a good permanent position to occupy in life.

It's 2022 as of the time of this writing. One hundred years ago we did not have antibiotics. Only sixty years ago (out of the thousands since Socrates) did we have access to the birth control pill. The idea that some genetic contribution by you or anyone will matter is fantastical. Technology will override this in the way keyboards overrode cursive.

At any rate, and this is harsh but must be considered: some people are better than other people in a work/production/creation sense, and those people can output more with their lives. Even if you don't know how to describe what you do for a living, if you are reading this you are probabilistically speaking better in an output sense than a typical dishwasher and it's not a stretch to say you shouldn't spend your life doing that. Denying this is delusional. If you're willing to accept that, it's just a question of *how far* you are from the perma-dishwasher life.

That's what has been promised with sperm sorting technology in some of these IVF experiments. It's not entirely unreasonable we could find that having kids with *basically anyone* if you are genetically unoptimized is actually very suboptimal and you should try to avoid doing that unless you can optimize their genetics through technology. We aren't far from the point where Amazon drones deliver mail. Who is to say a normal-genetics child will even have a job? From a hereditary standpoint, it doesn't really matter who your partner is then.

****** YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE CHILDREN BECAUSE YOU DON'T WANT TO "DIE ALONE" ******

A lot of decisions are made based on this fear of "dying alone."

Many people have no say in how they are going to die. I might not. It's plausible you won't either.

A lot of people are killed. The reality of this is not fully appreciated: there is some percent of real humans for whom the last thing they see is another person — another breathing, bleeding, shitting, hairy meatbag — taking their existence away through a gun or rope or knife or car or whatever. An even smaller percent of that group are tortured to death. Please don't headsand this; actually try to imagine how horrifying that must be for the victim.

Other people die of causes that are preventable, but which nonetheless give them no say in the circumstances of how they're going to die: starvation, disease, whatever.

This american middle class fantasy of peacefully passing into an afterlife surrounded by your loved ones is at odds with how the majority of people have died throughout history and how many people alive today will die at some point after you read this. Lots of people used to burn to death. Many will.

No decisions about your future should be made with some idealistic death fantasy in mind. Not children, not marriage, not the city you choose to live in, not anything. Make your decisions based on what you realistically see happening in a five or ten year time frame, supported by good reasoning and evidence. Children are not a means to comfort yourself about death.

****** RED FLAG NORMIE REASONS ******

! Legacy/patriarchy:

Many men have this idea that you should continue some sort of family line like a patriarchy. This is, coincidentally, exactly what my father wants me to do (and exactly what I'm not going to do, for a bunch of reasons) but this mindset traces to premises about legacy. As a friend of mine put it, "all we have is our dicks" — you might not have anything going for you, but through your penis you can create an imprint on the world that you and *we* view to be tangible, even if that's only just creating another person. The extreme of male temptations is to fuck someone else into existence and live through them. If at all possible, refrain from doing this.

! Just wanting to have kids to have kids:

Many of you will be baby-crazy, which is a hormonally mediated desire to have kids somewhat beyond your control. By definition this is indefensible for the same reason that a mental condition would let you plead the insanity defense. (Yes, we live in a deterministic universe, but there are still gradations of agency within this universe.) "Neurochemicals made me do it" isn't a defense for any other impulse, so why should it be for impulsive human-creating?

With that said, the desire isn't completely misguided. Being baby-crazy for the sheer appreciation of raising another person is fine as long as you don't focus on the "baby" part. It's crucial that when you think of having a baby you think of having a *person*. You WILL raise a cute human being into a less-cute human being who is potentially a very annoying human being, and that person will go into adulthood and vote and affect the lives of other people long after you've made them exist. A lot of people only focus on the cute human part.

(Seriously, a lot of people don't plan for what's going to happen after the kid stops being cute. A lot of parents will romanticize the first four years of the kid's life. Once they're old enough to talk they don't care about them anymore, or definitely not to the same degree.)

! Being happy:

Finally, the purest reason to have children is just that you want to be happy from the joy of creating other people. You love your partner, you want to combine yourselves and have a half-version. This is defensible, but I don't think that a lot of people think this way. I think that kids mostly happen accidentally. My guess is that an extremely small percent of children are made with just this reason in mind. Please feel welcome to change my mind through your actions.

****** OPPORTUNITY COSTS TO CONSIDER ANYWAY ******

The financial costs are the obvious costs: $13,000/year based on whatever insane metric op-eds with backend advertising interests use to determine this. (Realistically you could probably get it down to $6,000 or $3,000 or even less but that's still considerable; that's a used car every year.)

Aside from money it's undeniable that children take a lot of time, finances, and attention — children require somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 hours (555-1111/year or about 1.5hr-3hr/day) from the period of 0-18 (BLS data), not including relationship obligations; as previously mentioned the cost of a child reduces disposable income by about $13,000 per year for the lifetime of the child; and, outside of direct engagement with the child, children require a lot of cognitive real estate that can be devoted to tasks, projects, or ideas. (Don't underestimate the importance of cognitive real estate. See: http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html)

I polled some of my friends who had kids ages 4-12. I was able to get a decent time estimate of how much time they spent; this is pre-pandemic, by the way. One friend of mine was spending between a quarter and a third of her time with her kids. (I believe that the husband was spending about a quarter of his time with kids.)

****** COLLECTIVE OPPORTUNITY COST THROUGH LOST TALENT ******

The idea that smart/talented people should marry and have kids for the good of the species neglects the opportunity cost of their lost output. This may or may not be applicable to us, but it's worth thinking about anyway.

To put it differently: for as much of a walking meme he is, and for as much as he's been made into a larger-than-life caricature by the sigma male grindset part of social media, the world still nonetheless loses to the extent Elon Musk spends his time chasing pussy, and is obligated to a relationship, and is obligated to children. Yes, Elon Musk has kids, but he is quite distant from them compared to most parents — and given how much he achieves now, we can of course ask, all other things being equal, how much he would have achieved if he had never had kids in the first place.

For an extremely talented or capable few, the argument goes like this:

(a) there are many people whose accomplishments provably benefit the world

(b) there are people who did not have kids who achieved things that we would not benefit from if they had kids

(c) it stands to reason that there are many people who have had kids who, in an alternate timeline, would have made some significant and beneficial-to-humanity accomplishment if they forewent having kids

(d) therefore, it's reasonable to ask: if you are smart/talented, what output and accomplishments might you be sacrificing by having children?

This is not a useful question to entertain for a lot of people. Many if not most people never think in terms of the opportunity cost of their achievements. For most people having kids is just, well, a thing to do. And, yeah, this needs to happen for humans to keep humaning.

What I am disputing, though, is the all-too-common idea that smart or talented people will necessarily benefit the world by having kids. If accomplishment matters for the person in question — be it me, you, or someone else — these questions are worth asking and thinking about.

I mean, the proliferation of ideas is in some sense longer lasting than a child. Who remembers Einstein's children? We sure as fuck remember the theory of relativity, though. And it's delusional to say we're not affected by the proliferation of the theory of relativity or its consequences. There is an alternate universe where we, as a species, are worse off because Einstein decided to have ten children instead of three and spread his attentional resources thin, and you can perform this experiment with every mega-talented figure. In cases like these, having children isn't a personal choice. It's a matter of public interest.

****** UNSAVORY REALITIES ******

Okay, okay. Suppose you don't think you'll accomplish anything.

You could still dislike your kids. This is important and you cannot headsand this.

I reiterate: disliking your kids is entirely a real possibility. More parents should be aware that it's entirely possible for them to not love their children; that's a very real possibility. It's unfortunate, but it *IS* real. It happens quite a bit. Social desirability bias will fudge the results but I would guess based on surveys I've read personally that about one in 10 parents doesn't like at least one of their children. If that's true, and I am one of those people, I have a 10% risk of dumping away potentially 1/3 of my life for a child I don't really like. Would you take a 1/10 chance of disliking 1/3 of your life if it was caused by a friend — or anything else?

****** MY THOUGHTS ON MY DECISIONS ******

My father has for most of my life treated me as an impediment; not just in the sense that my existence has constrained his choices, but in that he clearly wonders what he could have done had I not been his life. This goes beyond indifference and approaches disregard. There's an envy to my father's character insofar as if what I accomplish involves being better than him he can't be proud, and is only proud up to the point that he could himself imagine doing it. (This likewise applies to outearning him.) As such he resents formal education; anything beyond a high school diploma is a threat, and during COVID he turned anti-vaccination due to among other things the implication that he must make concessions to people who know vastly more than he does. I had to drag him to the graduation for my master's degree, and even then he seemed indifferent. I didn't bother telling him about my second MA.

A lot of people don't realize that while "tiger parents" have an obviously difficult sense of approval, it's grounded in *something*. When your sense of accomplishment is *very much not grounded in anything*, you have to find an external and alternate sense of accomplishment that you've invented yourself, either wholly or partially. That can be very difficult to (1) pursue (2) believe and (3) maintain. (This is also why I value honorable victories and the idea of meaningful victory in general. Hierarchies can be invalidated by lacking credibility, i.e. an accomplishment that depends on lying about standards of evaluation isn't one.)

There is a point to this anecdote: you could be a similar father to my father, in the sense that you might be resentful of your kid. I can't rule out the possibility that I could be the same way, because I resemble him in other ways I'd rather not. I've never felt like strong family bonds. Some people really, really do: some people feel a sense of warmth and happiness at the idea of babies in general. I don't feel anything. Consider that you may be among me.

****** POTENTAL UPSIDES ******

I feel like every step that I take towards children could be a step away from something authentically influential.

But I don't *really* know that — my friends who gave me time estimates gave those estimates with three children. It could be that if you just have one kid, then it's actually a substantially easier time. I could be persuaded to have one kid but not two.

It's also not as simple as "children take away your time" because certain atmospheres are good for productivity. I work better when I'm around people that I care about, first of all. When I'm by myself — as in totally alone, wilderness-alone — I can fuck off; like "spend all day in groupchats" fuck off. I can justify fucking off for longer and I get distracted more easily.

When I have a person to be obligated to I am more likely to maintain a schedule, and I have regularity and all of those things are good. This isn't a high bar; it can be as elementary as "go to my dentist" or "meet for lunch". It could very well be that having one child is actually really good. I don't know. I've just never found a woman who I felt like children would make me happy with.

That's the core issue, and most of the women I go for don't want kids — 4 out of the last 5 I've felt a substantial connection with, by my count, so I've not needed to revise the core issue. I could be persuaded, but the circumstances must be incredible to make me persuaded; frankly this is not just rare but extraordinary.

However — and this is in fact gay — there is the sense where a child is a rebirth of your new life. "You can fail in your 20s but not in your 40s" or something like that — the flip side to this is that if you don't have children, you can fail whenever. It doesn't matter. There is a flexibility to life if you just don't have children to be to caring for. It's like learning a new language at 33; when you have a kid this might seem ridiculous, but when you don't it's no different than learning it at 23. You have until about 65 or 70 until your brain really starts declining into the gutter. That's when a lot of the Nobel Prizes are achieved.

Yes, as per earlier, if you really are an extremely influential person it's probably beneficial for you to *not* have kids, e.g. Steven Pinker and General Mattis. Both of them have benefited the world much more so by choosing to not have children, because their output has been so much greater and we benefit from their work. I actually think that the careerist decision about children is honorable, and in many cases morally righteous.

But that's a gamble. If you're not that person, if you're just a fuckboy, then you won't really output anything worth neglecting the decision to have children for. It's very possible this could be me.

Regardless, having a substantial life partner is much more important to me than the time costs or anything else. If the life partner is someone who really wants children — I want happiness with a partner fundamentally, and if I can have that with a partner who wants kids, I will be definitely much happier. Perhaps more anyway.

True love is rare. There's not really a basis of comparison. If I love a woman, I can't imagine not also loving our child. I at least feel like I would have this authentic sense of love for the kid. It's difficult for me to imagine that the hybrid of a person I love more than anything and myself would be bad.

And ultimately, love is really important. Way more than anything else listed above; for as much as I want to say otherwise, it's not even close. If a child enhances that, then so what?

****** BUT ANYWAY ******

Whether this moves you in favor or against or further in either direction, these are my thoughts on the issue. I hope you've appreciated it.

- Alfred MacDonald
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