If you're this patient with albaby-babies, those kids are lucky. :-)

I'm not. Because my kids are mostly giving me reasons why they shouldn't have to unload the dishwasher or why it's the other one's turn to walk the dog. Those reasons are sometimes entertaining or creative, but I don't really care much about discovering some new excuse to get out of a chore. Lol.

But I genuinely am interested in foreign policy and economics. So, I like hearing from folks like Dope who have a very different set of beliefs and expectations about how the world works.

For example, the Trump Administration seems to expect that there will be a very large amount of investment by U.S. oil firms in Venezuela in the near term now that Maduro is gone. This seems to me very unlikely. However, the Administration feels quite confident about this - so maybe I'm missing something? I'm curious what that might be. Maybe I'll learn something. But obviously, I don't have the chance to have a conversation with anyone in the Trump Administration about why they think this.

That's why I like having conversations with conservatives and supporters of the Administration. They will do their best to try to explain why the Administration's view of what's going to happen is correct. They'll have consumed conservative media in a way that I do not, so they might be exposed to a government explanation or discussion that I haven't seen. They might have seen an analyst or commentator I'm not familiar with. Or maybe they just happen to know the answer in a way that I've missed. Even if I don't think the answer's convincing, I'll still have learned a bit more about why the people who do support the policy (or think it's likely to have good outcomes) think that way.

That doesn't often happen when we're having the same argument between the kid who only wants Thai food and the one who wants any type of food except Thai.