Important for whom exactly? If it's you who are called convicted pedo by Google AI summary, it's you who has vital interest in additional research but not me who reads it. There's intentions mismatch. Which probably would destroy your life, and you won't call it "entertainment" then, I think.
The irony is that virtue-signalling (which your comment certainly is) is a shared identity declaration. Which is a part of the same inherent human predisposition to form groups which we call "tribalism" when we like to don't like it.
That's called the paradox of tolerance and it's not the gotcha that you think it is. If you think "mankind should overcome bigotry" is such a divisive statement that it splits people into "tribes," that reveals more about you than it does about me.
Did I even write anything about political contents of your signalling? I believe I didn't. I also didn't "reveal" anything particularly bad about you. I said that your urge to ring it is of the same social nature (aka tribal), we (humanity) have been exhibiting for all written and unwritten history, while the message itself expressing that you're above it makes it contradictory in ironic way. No matter what your signal proclaims, the process of tribal-building around it is most certainly divisive[1], with obligatory bit of outwards directed derision. So... then you reacted with suggesting I'm some sort of morally inferior outgroup voice. Which I think, proves the point you have missed.
[1] Which is not always bad. This is core mechanics of our competitive adaptiveness probably. It's just that being more aware of this gives us a chance to be better in more universal terms with other humans. Including in politics, of course.
P.S. If you felt offended, sorry! I can't say I care too much ngl, it's the internet after all, but it wasn't my intention either. I also didn't downvote you.
For this theory to be plausible we need to imagine that hedonistic creatures couldn't find anything more hedonistic than caring for multiple kids before industrialization. It doesn't sound realistic, mildly speaking. The modern culture simply doesn't oblige you to marry, and procreate the way it did 1-2 (depending on where you are) generations before. In the times of my mother's youth not marrying before 25-26, and not having at least one kid before 30 could really negatively affect someone's social standing. There are segments of modern West where culture still prioritizes procreation (like Orthodox Jews you mention, or old school Catholics) and they do procreate successfully despite being the same creatures as everyone else. Preferred hedonism is in culture, not nature.
It's 2026 now and we know for sure that applying purely economic stimuli did nothing substantial to birthrate anywhere. FWIW kids of rich parents do not procreate somehow better even if they are not constrained by housing market.
I don't think this shows that people who can afford housing have more kids. And it shows that even households earning over $700k/year are now below replacement (replacement fertility rate is about 2.1).
In the graph, fertility rates decline with income until around $275k. Those aren't families who can't afford housing. Those are well-off families with low birth rates. The birth rates start to climb in that chart only for the ~4% wealthiest families.
Also, you might reasonably conclude from that chart that rich women (in the $400k+ brackets) have more children, but that's not what the chart is actually showing. It's a synthetic total fertility rate, and not the actual TFR. They look at how many children women in that income bracket had this year, and estimate how many children they would have had if kept that reproductive rate for their whole reproductive period. That's going to misestimate the true rate due to selection effects. So, for example, a women who only wants one child is more likely to choose to have that child at 30, when her family income is higher, than at 18. But that doesn't imply she would have had more children if she had more money.
To put it another way, even if giving people more money had no effect whatsoever on their total fertility rate, you'd still expect the graph to curve up like that due to how people time their pregnancies.
Evolution doesn't work like that. What we have here is a dead end. For whatever reason, this system isn't advantageous from an evolutionary perspective, so we don't reproduce. That's natural selection.
Will we discover life extension technology before we stop having children and humanity simply dies off? Between Altered Carbon and Children of Men, I feel like that's a book and a blockbuster movie waiting to be written.
If conscious machines are even 80% as smart as us and 1) never die and 2) can replicate memories, why would anyone have children again? I'd imagine we'd desperately try to build brain uploads or be intolerably jealous of our eternal life robot kin.
We're going to be so jealous of the robots. They'll have everything and never die.
If this chart showed what you seem to believe it shows, there would be glaring difference between brackets, similar to secular Jews vs Orthodox. What it probably shows is that pro-procreation minority partners has more leverage in pushing their wives/husbands towards having kids when they can appeal to already high economic/social status. Not making a significant change overall though.
Economic stimulus does nothing about affordability of goods in a shortage. Quite the opposite, economic stimulus just causes inflation for goods in a shortage. Which is exactly what we’ve seen for 15 years.
It's a bit of evasion. If you support the claim that it's housing which keeps Western societies birthrate low, you building your theory on the same sand of "economy prevents youth from having kids".
I have a large extended family and we're fairly tight-knit. Lots of family gatherings each year. When questions like this pop up we can just ask the "kids" what they think (kind of a neat idea). Here's the top three replies from last Thanksgiving:
1) We can't afford it.
2) There isn't really a "dating scene" anymore.
3) I'm not starting a family in this country.
and that's the end of things because we either can't or won't address their concerns.
The problem with "just" asking people is that people aren't always aware of the reasons for their own behavior, and even if they are, they are prone to giving socially desirable answers, _especially_ in a social setting like a family Thanksgiving dinner.
Point 1 about affordability is directly contradicted by the fact that low income households are having the most children (except for a tiny minority of ultra rich), and those kids are rarely starving to death.
Point 2 is true, and probably a factor, but even married couples and partners sharing a household are having less children than before.
Point 3 is another excuse: fertility rates are low in _all_ industrialized nations in the world, from Canada, Italy, to Australia, to Japan, with perhaps Israel as the only exception. Meanwhile the countries with high fertility rates are absolutely terrible places to live like Afghanistan or Somalia.
Right. Kids cost time and money. So the lifestyle you can afford _with_ kids is slightly lesser than _without_ kids. But this is true at all income levels below the richest 1% or so.
Every person who chose to have kids had to make some lifestyle adjustments. If "we cannot afford kids" just means "if we had kids we'd have to make some lifestyle adjustments" then practically nobody could afford kids in this sense, including the overwhelming majority of people who _did_ have kids and are doing fine.
That shows that "we cannot afford kids" is not really the reason you're not having kids. More honestly it's "we prefer having more time and money over having children" which is not even an objectively bad preference, but people don't like phrasing it that way because it sounds selfish.
So they say "we cannot afford it", suggesting "we _would_ have kids if we had more money", except in reality they still wouldn't, because at a higher income level they'd be making exactly the same argument, too. Which is why we see fertility rates _decreasing_ with income levels, up to a household income of approximately $500K/year in the US.
Income is not wealth. The crisis is caused by the inability for the median income here to build wealth. That people can’t separate the two is a large part of the problem.
As long as your saving is being eaten by asset inflation, no matter how fast you’re running, you’re still on a treadmill.
Babies are also free labor. They are just like the AI agents of today, parents had their children do a variety of things around the farm, instead of paying for tokens, they had to feed them, thats all.
Early childhood public spending as a percentage of GDP has a strong positive correlation with fertility. That is, among nations that have already experienced the fertility drop associated with women's employment.
I strongly recommend that report to anyone interested, there is a lot of interesting work in it, even just to skim the pictures like I did. That said, I have to say I really don't think "Early childhood public spending as a percentage of GDP has a strong positive correlation with fertility" is a useful takeaway from it. True, yes. Useful no.
Firstly, assuming we're looking at pg 50, seems to be correlation not causation - causation could be reversed (no children -> no need to spend). Secondly, there are so many correlations in that report that picking out any specific one is a bit random.
Also it isn't immediately clear if they're population weighting since the graph makes the US look like an equal to LUX instead of a 300 million person behemoth. To me that seems to make the correlation a minor curio.
Invoking 1857 is not a valid argument really, cause consumer priorities were different. Cheaper with some level of risk (which today's American, or German would consider excessive) was preferred option hence the market response as it was - at least it's a reasonable guess.
In less rich countries it is how things work right now.
Industries dump toxic waste into waterways if they can get away with it in the US today (literally today [0]). I agree that I might not be specifically worried about borax milk if FDA was reversed, but I would absolutely expect risky shortcuts in food offerings.
The incentives in the market has never changed. That's what regulation is for, shifting market incentives/forces to favor consumers/society.
Pollution is an externality. If Alice hires a company to do "Hydro Excavation" and they pollute Bob's water, even if Bob knows all about it and is entirely opposed, he can't prevent it by not patronizing them because he isn't a party to the transaction. So the solution to this has to be to prohibit pollution.
Product safety is about information. When Bob knows that a particular brand of milk is adulterated with chalk, he doesn't buy it. Which means that all you need for this is product labeling and liability. If the ingredients list chalk, the customer who doesn't want chalk doesn't buy it. If the ingredients don't list chalk then the seller is not in compliance if the product contains it. If the battery is unsafe then you can both not purchase it because the reviews concluded it was unsafe or sue them if your house burns down. And the compliance process is simple: You list the actual ingredients on the label and have responsibility for damages caused by your product. No massive regulatory bureaucracy with thousands of pages of rules, just liability for fraud and harm.
The problem for all of these is that the perpetrator has to be in your jurisdiction. If companies in China are emitting copious amounts of CO2, regulations in Europe can't do much about it. If those companies are making unsafe products that end up on the world market, you can't sue them in the US because they have no real presence in the US. But complex product regulations don't solve that either, because they too are subject to the same problem; foreign companies drop ship things that don't comply. Nor does putting the liability in the wrong place, because generic transportation or payments intermediaries are in a worse position than the government itself to be the ones evaluating things that come over the border.
Consider it this way: Why doesn't US customs exclude unsafe products from being imported from other countries? Consider what they would have to do to actually accomplish that.
> Product safety is about information. When Bob knows that a particular brand of milk is adulterated with chalk, he doesn't buy it. Which means that all you need for this is product labeling and liability.
This is regulation, and it's only as good as enforcement. Meaning it requires government inspections and labs. Again, we've already proven this in history.
> sue them if your house burns down
Sure, if you only care about compensation and not prevention. Also I don't think you've considered the practicalities of your example, in that no regular person will 1. determine the battery cause. 2. prove it. 3. bring a successful suit against a corporation.
> Consider it this way: Why doesn't US customs exclude unsafe products from being imported from other countries? Consider what they would have to do to actually accomplish that.
Well... they do seize millions of products yearly. It's generally sub-$800 packages getting through. Your original point of incumbents targetting upstarts and thus forcing "burner" companies is the wrong causality. Burner companies are incentivized to specifically skirt liability and reputation. Regulating the frontend incentivizes self-policing against sub-companies designed to be dissolved.
I can't understand what exactly is in this dream you want to become true. It sounds like you want a portable device with physical keyboard, and reasonable screen size. Which is laptop.
When good keyboard, and decent-sized screen are priorities, "fits into pocket" is (self-)deception as they presumably will be carried in a backpack anyway. In other words it's unwieldy laptop one part of which fits into pocket.
Alternative is to hope for keyboard and screen to be present at special places. Which however means that practical portability is very limited. Also it would affect security, personal ergonomics etc.
I assume it's something like mine. I want a phone I can dock and use as a desktop with a monitor and mouse/keyboard. That is just a phone when undocked.
We have reactive UIs and desktop mode on android. It's getting very close. I am not certain on the previous commentors reasons but I detest the many device game. A 500 dollar pixel 10a is a great computer and I would rather not buy another machine if I dont have to.
And if every iPhone was also a Mac when attached to a monitor and keyboard, monitors and keyboards would become entirely common - as with the hotel example.
My iPhone 15 Pro Max is more capable than a MacBook Neo; it’d be nice if it could be one.
Looks great! However I'm not sure how it is supposed to work. Like, should it play doom when I click doom? For me it started with Black Sabbath, and it doesn't change
This is factually incorrect. Blockade is not a synonym of embargo. Blockade is generally an act of war, and embargo is not. Dealing with Cuba is certainly a huge PITA for the majority of trading actors because of potential blacklisting in the US, but waters around Cuba are as open as they can be, and you can check marine traffic to make sure that ships arrive to Cuban ports. Even from the US itself (cause there are exceptions from embargo such as food, and medicines).
Sorry, english is not my first language. I did not realize there was a strong difference between blockade and embargo. Thanks for the correction.
Though to be fair, there is currently an actual oil blockade run by the USA. And the previous embargo imposed sanctions on international entities dealing with Cuba, so it was not exactly 100% open even though technically you could sail there.
E.g. about 2 weeks ago Russian tanker arrived to port Matanzas, Cuba (again this is searchable data). It didn't fight it's way though American cordons, it just arrived. Embargo can hit a trader's wallet hard, but it's still not a blockade.
And i appreciate the politeness of your corrections!
I'm not aware of the details, but i was under the impression that an actual blockade is going on? That's at least what many media are claiming, as summarized in this wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Cuban_crisis
Do you have any resources explaining how that russian tanker would not be an isolated case but a symptom of widespread incorrect reporting on the issue? Or is the truth somewhere in the middle, that the USA would let through a tanker or two just to keep the pressure high but not explosive?
Or it can be: people who went to protect us, and as it's an act which often requires serious sacrifice we praise them. And in any case treating PTSD is good in general.
This particular data doesn't show this. Just in case: I'm neither German nor Southern European, and I declare my neutrality.
For starters, it shows time spent at work. Meanwhile employees can do varying amount of work in the same amount of time. And I suppose that's what those Germans you referring to mean.
Second as the document notes: "The results are affected by the varying proportions of part-time workers across countries, in addition to differences in legal frameworks and in country-specific usual length of the workweek".
I read an article many years ago, by a man who was working 80 hour weeks. He analyzed his work and tried to optimize it.
Eventually he cut his working hours in half, while actually doubling his output, because the shorter work hours required him to actually focus.
He was, of course, self-employed, and could design his work week how he liked.
I guess that's important for another reason: if someone else had been paying him by the hour, he would have experienced a 50% pay cut. Instead, his income doubled, because it was based on the actual results.
I would like to strike a better balance between charging by the hour and complete fix price, especially where the work is hardly predictable up front. The problem here is a mix of trust, respect and discipline. If both parties share these values and an hour really represents useful AND needed output than the actual time spent would always be larger than the billed amount. We do have such understanding with some clients and consultants/ contractors. This works well if the work is on-off, shorter projects with people that have a long-term professional relationship. Of course, such an approach will never go down with people who have a stubborn accounting mindset.
Within the tech industry, we rely on people to think things through well. Because like with other engineered systems actually changing things later has a real cost, even though it's all an artificial, massless construct and even though we do have AI to do some of the grunt work. The problem is, we are building understanding, predictability and bigger changes tend to make some assumptions obsolete. Sometimes you don't even know which exactly, unless you have precisely engineered the change - costing thinking time that is mostly invisible, e.g. people only write down the result of the thinking or the gist of the straightened path to that result if you are lucky. Almost nobody writes down the paths not taken and the reasoning for those decisions along the way. All of this is the proof of work that's missing or that's hard to verify, if it was created honestly and not inflated artificially.
So yes, measuring work, efficiency of spending time doing work and agreeing on compensation are the hard parts, especially if we cut trust out of the equation.
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