More crazy than the Cold War? The World Wars? The great flu pandemic? The Chinese Civil Wars? The European Wars of Religion? The Black Death? The Mongol Invasions?
I can't think of a single year in human history when the world wasn't crazy (maybe with the exception of a couple years in the late 1990s)
Every ancestor of yours since single cell organisms has reproduced. If they could all do it, you can to. Especially given that you live a more cushy life than 99.9999% of them.
To not be would be utter madness. For those who can and opt not to, they are perpetuating the tragedy of the commons.
We face the largest demographic crisis ever and we're passing the problem onto the young while draining them via taxation, whislt demanding ever increasing benefits in an all out land grab.
In 1950 the ratio of those paying into the system versus withdrawing was 15:1, were now at 2:1.
The problem is the draining by taxation, not the absolute number of productive people.
It is far from evident what size of real productive population is needed to sustain a society. With modern tools it does feel like it could be in the realm of sub 10% of the population. This will get even more wild if the techno-optimists are correct.
Depending on how close we are to biophysical bounds trying to increase the population to the historically required productive ratios is just going to make living conditions worse for the average person.
There seems to be a fairly strong correlation between wealth and childlessness, so the obvious guess is that the world is getting wealthier. Exactly why that stops people having kids is a bit unclear to me though. Maybe being a parent is one of those things that is a harder sacrifice to make the more alternative comforts have to be given up.
Economics has a simple answer: public pensions are a classic tragedy of the commons. If the pension system didn't exist, then people would be incentivised to have more children to support them in old age, instead of a free rider problem where everyone relies on everyone else having children.
The demographic crisis of refusing to allow young people and families into the country? You want people to have kids so that we can keep America white?
America has a more liberal immigration policy than practically anywhere else on the planet, as evidenced by the massive change in demographics over a mere half century. You would like it to go faster?
Please go advocate for the Chinese to take immigrants from everywhere on earth at the same time, which they currently do not at all. Or do you not care about that for some reason?
The topic was “Americans must have babies because we need more young people”. There are plenty of young people who would move here but aren’t allowed in - would you like to disagree with that? Or address it in any way whatsoever?
Do you think there is any chance that the characteristics of human territories are determined in significant part by the natural tendencies of their inhabitants?
Do you think there is any chance that there is a diverse set of natural tendencies among humans, clustered by what sort of environmental filters those humans passed through? For example, surviving “trying to kill you” winter every year for thousands of years in a row with survivor man tier technology, where planning and tool design/making are critical, vs not?
I’m literally asking if you think there’s no chance, and if so, how do you know that? Was it scientifically proven? I’ve looked long and hard for that, and gosh I just couldn’t find where that ever happened.
If there is a chance, though, then we are gambling at (further) becoming Brazil in order to save the comfort of one single generation of old people. Yeah I think I’ll pass on that, thanks.
As for alternate solutions. We could allocate available resources based on how many descendants the old person produced. Why should we tolerate free riders and make the young produced by others pay for them? Let them be in old people dorms. Let them have insufficient medical care. It isn’t worth risking the quality of the country over, obviously. And if we use the scheme I mentioned, then they aren’t anybody’s grandparents, anyway. Who will fight for them?
The values you hold, the ones you are defending right now, are western values. Your type seems so sure that the newcomers can be brainwashed to think like we do. Good luck with that! Egalitarianism is not the norm historically or globally. It certainly isn’t the human default.
Why not? It's not like every country in the world can rely on immigration and brain drain. Don't you think it is alarming that the country can't produce enough people to maintain a stable-state population and instead has to rely on a parasitic strategy?
Not intrinsically alarming, no. If I thought the country should be self-sufficient in isolation then there are many weak points I’d prioritize before birth rate.
I installed zorin on an old machine that was given to me because it wouldn’t run win 11. I like it a lot. Debian based, clean smooth UI. Just tell them Microsoft improved the user experience with windows 11.
X X Windows L.E. => (e)X X Windows (Wayland) L.E. (Linux Edition)
Even the one major 'windows' app that my mom needs to use is going Web only... so I figure if I install Debian Stable + Widevine that'll cover 99.9% of the use case and I gain an OS that just works correctly.
I thought about giving my son this advice. When a country has 40 trillions in debt and another country has budget surplus you know where the fun will be 20 years from now when my son will start living his life.
Unfortunately, China is not a nation of immigrants. And also, living in China means living under CCP's rule - and Xi keeps turning the screws. So, unfortunately, this will not work :(.
Solar is dead simple. The cell puts out 12v. Theres some maths around parallel and serial but you don’t need to know that for repairs. The cells connect into a box that puts out ac. If the box fails you buy a new one (no user serviceable parts inside is what the sticker says). If the wires break you splice them.
If something hard breaks and you decommission a system the cells are still good and can be trivially reused. If a cell fails it’s obvious and it can be pulled out of rotation.
If only there was a way to deploy solar production at the point of consumption so power didn’t need to be transferred.
We’d need large chunks of unused flat surface pointing towards the sky, preferably at an angle. Oh wait we have that on top of every home (coincidentally the south or west face of every roof provides about enough surface area to power most homes). Now we need some cheap way of storing energy produced during the day for use at night. Humm. Got that too. Government don’t even need to pay the full price for this resilience and climate mitigation. Programs offering fractional tax credits have shown great success in increasing deployments of rooftop solar and distributed battery storage.
Nostradamus predicts headline in 10 months. State of Bavaria deeply irritated by Microsoft’s shenanigans, drops Microsoft cloud in favor of literally any other solution.
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