This attitude is my problem with this day. If this is a day celebrating the nation and how we overcame the evil of slavery to create something better, emancipating millions of fellow Americans, I’m for it.
If this is a federal holiday to “center blackness” and “put our attention on black folk”, then that’s state sanctioned racial factionalism and perpetuates an arrogant race centrism that’s already all too prevalent among some segments of black Americans. That I will not celebrate.
We should be creating a society that celebrates Americans, regardless of their skin color. Emancipation day is a great thing, over half a million Americans (many white) died to correct an evil that denied freedom to millions of our fellow Americans - it’s a tragedy so many had to die, but their sacrifice made a better country for all of us.
Yeah, the problem is that we don’t have a society like that and the only way white people know how to do that is to erase the contributions of Black people AFTER they’ve stolen everything from us and literally treated us as property. So excuse me if we think it’s okay to center Blackness for a month and a day when white folks (which is what you are even if you aren’t) are centered the rest of the year.
All the reasons they cite are no where near the main reason for the collapse in birth rates.
Look at charts of birth rates in any country. Easy enough to google.
Look at the decline and when it declines.
There was a decline due to the global recession, yes. This pales in comparison to the decline that came precipitously decades earlier.
It’s: birth control and family planning.
Look at birth rates in: the US, the UK, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea…now overlay it with when birth control became widely legal and family planning initiatives took off.
Look at countries that continue to have high birth rates and how they treat birth control/family planning.
Look at communities that continue to have high birth rates: the poor, the religious, the Amish.
Even today, something like 50% of births in the US are unintended or mistimed. Imagine what the birth rate would be with even MORE access to birth control.
Fact is: humans procreate by and large unintentionally. It’s enough to evolve a desire for sex, and the babies follow. When you introduce technology that severs this connection, you expose the shortcuts nature took all along.
If we want to fix this in the short term, it’s not clear how to do it. We can’t uninvent birth control, and heavily restricting it would be very unpopular and likely impossible. Baby stipends don’t seem to cut it.
In the long run, this fixes itself. Cultures, sociological conditions, genetics that result in more children will proliferate and the others will die out.
The future is either babies in incubators, or it’s Mormon. Maybe both.
the reason for people rushing to engage in birth control is mostly economics. everyone i know who prevented birth at an early age explicitly did so because it would have fucked their life up to have a baby--financially, career dreams, and education dreams.
again, anecdotal, but every single person i know who prevented birth at parents young age, did this for those specific reasons. sure, sti protection are a piece as well but it pales in weight to the economics.
if we remove those barriers i have zero doubt the birth rates would rise almost overnight. and by remove those barriers, i dont mean like the ridiculous "thousand dollars to have a baby" or whatever laughable amount they're putting forward now.
Are the economic conditions now the worst they’ve ever been in human history? By all accounts they seem to be among the best: your food is stable and cheap, shelter is affordable for the vast majority and it’s good shelter, a/c, electricity, etc
We’ve never had more pampered living conditions.
If the only economy in which people decide to have kids is the rarefied air of America in the 1950s when min wage could afford a home, then that’s far too narrow of living conditions for a species to propagate.
The reality is humans have always been costly, but people had them anyways for unintended + cultural reasons. When you have a child, they’re a massive productivity loss for 5+ years, so even subsistence farmer humans or hunter gatherer humans found them incredibly costly.
And the people today making great salaries in major cities could easily afford multiple kids while still being comfortable, but their lifestyle would be more modest than otherwise. People far poorer have far more children.
I could personally afford kids and I’m slightly above median household income as my wife is starting her own business. I don’t have them though, because there’s more I want to push to accomplish. That’s a very common sentiment, and it’s more to do with cultural priorities than economics.
First, I call BS on UN's "the sky is falling" propaganda. They asked if people are "having fewer children than they would like"? Hello, even Elon Musk would answer "yes" to that question, 50 kids are still too few for what he (or I, for that matter) would like to have.
Also, birth rates aren't a UNIVERSAL problem, vis-a-vis pollution some countries may benefit from less population and falling birth rates. World's population has TRIPLED in the last 75 years... Overpopulation itself is a huge disincentive for more children. The demographic issues must include overpopulation as a factor on a country-by-country basis, anything other than that is dirty politics.
I'm done with generalities, on to your comments:
> Are the economic conditions now the worst they’ve ever been in human history?
Spare time and pollution wise - yes. Both chemical and cultural pollution, both are tightly related to economics, I must add.
> And the people today making great salaries in major cities could easily afford multiple kids while still being comfortable, but their lifestyle would be more modest than otherwise.
You're missing an absolutely major and deciding factor - the rat race. It means all or nothing, it hasn't been a smooth curve for a long time. Income isn't like the volume control of your grandma radio, it's a two-way switch now - sound all the way up (no time to sleep) and sound all the way down - out of a job with unforgivable (by employers' standards) holes in your resume.
> When you have a child, they’re a massive productivity loss for 5+ years, so even subsistence farmer humans or hunter gatherer humans found them incredibly costly.
See my explanation above, there was no rat race back then, the work-time/income curve was a smooth slope. In fact, even serfs in the middle ages worked less hours - with nothing better to do, why not make kids? It's a no brainier. I guess, Africa on foreign aid is in the same basket.
There's literally only one country where the fertility rate has been stable since 1960, the Central African Republic: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?most_rec... Some countries have higher fertility rates still, but all of them have been experiencing a large decline.
This is almost the definition of technical analysis: “chart always reverted to mean so it will always revert to mean”
Note that almost every exchange outside the US has been flat or negative for decades. The US has held a precious position for a few generations that’s made “chart go up” feel like a given
>Note that almost every exchange outside the US has been flat or negative for decades.
As someone who works in finance this struck me as a remarkable claim. Upon inspection it turns out to be spectacularly incorrect. After adjusting for inflation it's actually the opposite, the vast majority of countries have seen their own version of the S&P 500 grow over a 30 year period, after adjusting for inflation, not stagnation or decline. Developing countries, particularly those in Asia, have seen incredible returns over a 30 year period, albeit with a great deal of volatility involved.
Our neighbor to the north, Canada, has seen gains that are slightly below the U.S., but our neighbor to the south, Mexico has seen about the same growth as our own, once again accounting for Mexico's own inflation.
Europe has also experienced a great deal of growth with many European countries even growing moreso than the U.S., for example Germany.
While there are examples of decline, they are in countries that are both poor and have unstable governments. Most countries that are strictly poor but don't suffer from instability have for the most part seen growth rather than stagnation.
So I don't know exactly what led you to believe your claim that "almost every exchange" has been flat or negative, but it's certainly not correct.
> Developing countries, particularly those in Asia, have seen incredible returns over a 30 year period, albeit with a great deal of volatility involved.
The level of the MSCI China index 30 years ago was HKD 70 and it's HKD 75 today. It's kind of incredible but not in a good way. Total return is less than 3% p.a. MSCI Thailand is even worse.
MSCI Korea has a total return of 7% (not bad, 4% above inflation) but it doesn't do better than developed countries.
Of course they look much better if we start right after the 1997 Asian financial crisis but, hey, it was you who talked about "a 30 year period".
I don't understand your follow up, are you still maintaining your claim that almost every other exchange in the world has been stagnant or declining?
Worth noting that a stock exchange becoming defunct is not the same as the value of the index associated with the stocks listed on that exchange going to zero.
For example numerous US stock exchanges also go defunct. Nevertheless the value of the stocks that traded on those exchanges remains unaffected. It's not like if NASDAQ went out of business tomorrow that Google and Microsoft would all declare bankruptcy.
And as a Canadian, there are different sectors that would have given me positive gains over the years (I generally own mostly VEQT, a globally-diversified ETF):
And it's perhaps looking more closely at what specifically about the US has been positive:
> Looking at this data, there are two distinct periods of extended U.S. outperformance—the late 1990s and today. And what do these two periods have in common? The rise of U.S. technology stocks. Bespoke Investment Group recently created this chart illustrating this phenomenon:
> Now that the U.S. technology sector makes up over 30% of the S&P 500 (as it did back in 2000), this begs the question: Is U.S. outperformance just a technological fad?
The thing is, we do actually have a tech industry and other countries largely do not. It’s like arguing that industrialized nations are only wealthier than agricultural nations if you include manufacturing. Thats the whole point!
I’ve come to understand “getting in shape” is literally that. Food just gives your body energy and nutrients, how you use your body decides what shape it’ll take (how it directs that energy and nutrients).
I’ve heard this before and just don’t get it. Buying healthy food is generally cheaper, or just as expensive in my experience. Buy some vegetables, some chicken, some fruit, eggs. These are generally very affordable, you just have to cook with them.
Sure, buying Just Salad is more expensive than buying McDonald’s, but that’s not the only options.
The bigger problem IMO: we put way more sugar, sweeteners, and addictive substances in food and have big portions where people feel obligated to finish. It’s very easy to eat 100g of sugar every day and hardly notice. Combine that with most American activities involving food and alcohol.
We have a culture that encourages eating and food that responds by being more eatable
Yet here I am on the other side surprised to hear you and others saying you’re lathering your poopy butt with your hands in a restaurant bathroom
We all gotta wash our butts, but it just seems more civilized to do it in the shower as you can get everything clean, you didn’t just crap, and you’re not eating with those same hands immediately afterwards.
Toilet paper + wet wipes are 100x more sanitary than what you describe
You’re last line is correct, it certainly counts less if money isn’t changing hands.
Not because money is some sacred object, but because money changes hands when you’re doing work for others. Money is just a lubricant that allows you to contribute your work to society and society to contribute to you in a generalized way rather than a village system where everyone returns the favor in kind.
Imagine we’re in a village, I’m a farmer, youre a tailor. If you want to get fed, you have to either grow your own food or you have to trade clothes to me the farmer because I’m the only one who can trade food back. As soon as you’ve traded with the farmers and we’re all set on clothes, now how are you going to eat? The result is everyone has to be a self sufficient subsistence farmer and only a few non farmers can be supported.
Money just abstracts that labor. It keeps the score on how much you created value for others and people pay you money that they received from the value they provided others.
Work you do for money is work you did for someone else. Picking up your groceries didn’t contribute to anyone else. It’s certainly necessary, nothing morally wrong with it, but society generally should be organized to incentivize contributing to society
A bunch of those things are work for others that's not paid. And that was far from an exhaustive list.
What's confusing to me is this notion that if we ease up a little on the stick of "your life will be ruined and you may actually die", the carrot of more money will stop working because people are just that lazy. No, they're not, they do tons of work for no pay.
You have to do something with your life anyway, right? I always envied people who have a calling they are good at and work on essentially until they die (especially in academia and art), since I'm not sure if I have one and if I do (designing 4x God sim games?) I'm unlikely to be paid for it even if I was good, which is itself also unlikely.
Then there's also the case where following your passion is near impossible without a large organization, anything from space to medicine.
But even forgetting all that, there is no reason engineering challenges, team dynamics and sense of accomplishment at a work project can't be higher than for the personal projects you'd do by yourself. Granted, most jobs aren't like that (for myself or for most people) but some of my most challenging and exciting projects were at work.
If you're gonna spend time until you die doing tech things you might as well get paid for it. The less you need the latter the pickier you can be, with your own thing becoming /another option/ at some point.
