> Most would consider the implications of that to be highly immoral.
I think it's already immoral how society punishes people for being childless when it's a natural thing and can be 100% caused by characteristics that you are born with and have no control over.
I guess it depends on where you live, but it is so much less expensive to be childless in the US. Monetary aid provided by the government does not cover the costs, let alone make it profitable.
And government aid is not just for unfortunate events, it's used to promote desired behavior. That's why there are subsidies for companies developing green energy and EVs, for farmers growing certain crops, for animal feed (very frustrating as someone who always has to pay more for veggie burgers), and many other things. Clearly, though, the US doesn't value parenthood very much because the monetary incentives simply are not enough. I guess when you know your replacement rates are kept afloat by immigration, you don't care much if your citizens have kids.
It's funny that you say being social is easier, because what I see is the opposite. Being a parent isn't a panacea for socialization. It can be very isolating when your childless friends can drop whatever they are doing to go have a good time (so they don't bother to make plans, they just go) while you have to secure a babysitter just to get a quiet dinner. Your friends have to accommodate you, and many will not.
As someone who is currently childless with both new parent friends and not-so-new parent friends, it's very clear to see how much simpler it is for the ones of us who don't have kids have to be social or follow their own interests.
I feel in no way compelled by any law or incentive to have children and am in fact dreading the day my wife is serious about having them, because I have seen first hand what it does to your bank account and your personal life.
> It can be very isolating when your childless friends can drop whatever they are doing to go have a good time
Yeah parents can't have as much spontaneous fun, but they don't have to deal with unhealthy loneliness of being alone on thanksgiving, christmas, vacations etc. Society is organised for the family unit, and there are no options for single people.
Only because of the subsidies. It's hardly "natural" for all humans to reproduce.
All living humans come from a long unbroken chain of natural selection and rejection of bad genes and reproduction of only the fittest to enable adaption to a changing environment.
If you create subsidies so that every human can reproduce, you are going to reverse natural selection and create survival of the unfittest where every bad gene will reproduce endlessly.
Not having children is just as "natural" as having children, it all depends of how your particular set of characteristics do in the current environment and foreseeable future.
> Only because of the subsidies. It's hardly "natural" for all humans to reproduce.
This is an incredibly bold statement. Most people like having sex, and in a natural state (sans birth control, online dating, internet porn, etc) there are going to be a lot of pregnancies. The idea that tax credits, welfare or parental leave is what is driving this situation is ridiculous. This feels more like a dog whistle about the welfare state, but even if you take away those "subsidies", people ain't gonna stop having kids, that's just not how the majority of young people of child-bearing age think.
> Better medical treatments and lack of wars are not child subsidies.
Lower education and religion is probably the biggest cause for these higher birth rates. In the victorian era, people would simply not get married if they didn't have the means to raise children, and they would be childless, and there was nothing strange about that. To give subsidies for everyone to have children comes from the post ww2 politics.
I think the biggest cause is actually high rates of child mortality. Humans have more children when there is a higher chance those children might not survive.
> If you create subsidies so that every human can reproduce, you are going to reverse natural selection
Using your own logic: if natural selection is that fragile, then it should evolve or die. We're not called to uphold it in any way; our own selfish genes inevitably predispose us not to worry about an evolutionary mechanism that does not directly affect us or our children.
Huh? It has to work out that or the human race dies out. I guess you could have a few couples who have a lot of kids instead, but developed societies are really adverse to that.
It is “natural” in the sense that we wouldn’t be here to talk about it if it wasn’t the case.
> Huh? It has to work out that or the human race dies out. I guess you could have a few couples who have a lot of kids instead, but developed societies are really adverse to that.
Obviously the human race somehow made it until we created developed societies. I think you are confusing survival of the human race with survival of our current pension system.
Who knows if it's really better or worse to suddenly allow everyone to reproduce?
For sure it's not "natural", and as far as I can see it would actually reverse evolution to regression instead.
And it seems like we can't really stop it anyway with how many men today are becoming outsiders in society because they get rejected to reproduce.
It’s natural only in the sense of a selection bias: we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t so. Men aren’t the limiting resource here, but if women start having less than 2.1 kids on average, we eventually just disappear. This is just math, not related to economics, morality, or ideology.
Yeah that's the point, so there really is no need for every man to have children, should it be the norm I'm wondering. Can we get rid of this natural selection, and should we? I don't know. Why is it so self-evident that every person should have children? Clearly it's not natural. It's just another artificial "equality" of a social welfare state.
If monogamy is valuable, and I think it is, then most men should be parents as well. I can’t imagine a world with a few guys fathering most of the kids, that seems like it would cause lots of problems.
You can still be monogamous if some women have more children, not every woman needs to have 2 children to achieve that average. A woman can easily have 4 children and suddenly half of the women can also be childless and still achieve a 2 children average.
The whole idea that child bearing should be perfectly and equally distributed across the whole population is a construct of the social welfare state, enabled by subsidies, and is just an artificial form of equality like any other. As such I think it should be examined and debated like everything else, and not taken for granted as self-evident or "natural".
> A woman can easily have 4 children and suddenly half of the women can also be childless and still achieve a 2 children average.
The median is close to the average in kids per women in the developed world. Having four kids is harsh on many women’s bodies; eg my grandma had 8 kids, but she died in her late 50s. While no doubt some couples will want to go for four kids or more, I don’t think it’s ethical to encourage it over a more standard 2 something for most couples.
Yes, a team of professional composers who call themselves "producers" who will "make suggestions" for how to change your songs from having potential, to being actually high quality music.
Yeah, but stability is important. Take the recent federal elections. Germany moved without any pain from a CDU/CSU/SPD to a three party government (SPD/Greens/FDP). No complaints about the election system, besides a too large Bundestag. Compare that to the US elections Biden/Trump: massive problems with the voting system: real and made up.
The Germans voted on paper. -> There was an undisputed result.
> For example, the Poles are much better at building apartments and transport infrastructure fast than anyone else on your list, including Germany.
Is it that they are 'much better' or the economy is in different stages? The housing market in Germany is much more expensive. It's much cheaper to build in Poland.
Germany already has a larger transport infrastructure. Example: Autobahn 13000 km in Germany vs. roughly 2000km in Poland.
Czech and Polish economies are fairly comparable, but Czech ability to build anything is in tatters. We are a NIMBY paradise, every modest block of flats takes a decade to approve. Our northern neighbours aren't, they build fast.
Poland was a post-Communist rust bucket a short time ago. It's easier to grow and leapfrog when you're starting low. Britain, France and Germany have a lot of inertia.
> I've started doing it recently and it is lovely - no need for a bundler/compile step.
Same here, I'm also doing on-demand module loading, it's an enormous productivity boost for me as a developer because of the shorter feedback loop, zero time spent fighting/configuring the tool chain, and how powerful the debugger in the browser is when it actually works. It's also a massive performance boost for the resulting web page because of orders of magnitude less code, and small entry point/initial page load.
If people would just admit, and adapt to, the fact that the browser won over native, and Oracle won over Sun, we would avoid this situation with armies of Java developers making rube goldberg variations of basic relational, sysadmin, and gui programming tasks. But then again, how would we employ all the people with these extreme productivity multipliers, as long as our politics and economic system is still pretending that we just had the industrial revolution, and need to man the assembly lines, then Parkinson's law will apply for tech work just like everything else.
When you say browser won over native, are you referring to the fact that software is more commonly accessed via web instead of software actually downloaded and installed on a user’s machine?
If you are always travelling then yeah, I guess it makes sense. The problem I have with minimalism is that it also minimises the activities you can do. Any sport and hobby requires stuff, the more stuff you have, the more activities you can do.
Painting, playing music, going swimming, skateboarding, playing tennis, running, picnic/barbecue, hiking etc etc.
If you don't have any stuff, you can't be active. I just get bored to death when the only thing I do in my free time, is looking at things and eating/drinking.
Some hobbies certainly require a lot of gear, but I think it's also possible to massively overdo the stuff-to-fun ratio. We go for four-hour hikes with our trainers, our badminton rackets weigh almost nothing and take up almost no space, and so on.
> If you don't have any stuff, you can't be active
This is simply false. We're currently on a little island and there are boats and stand-up paddle-boards to rent, we have a scooter and helmets we've rented and go for long drives, there are lots of multi-hour walks we've done in our sneakers, lots of scuba and snorkleing optins, there's kilometers and kilometers of beach to walk along. My only concession to this is travelling with a rash-vest for being in the sun, plus most of my shorts are very happy to get wet / be in the water
It also requires exponentially more stuff to be active year around, and adapting to a full time work/weekend schedule, compared to temporarily with a flexible schedule.
Just the beach walk will require a whole wardrobe of suitable clothes and shoes if you want to do it year around and live in a place with seasons. The scooter doesn't work in the winter.
Renting things also requires you to have a flexible schedule and be outside of the normal work week/weekend, because on a sunday when the weather is nice, everyone wants the stand-up paddle board and all the other stuff at the same time, that's the whole point of owning stuff, that it's there for you when you want it. Renting always means you get it when (most) other people don't want it.
It really depends on how much money you have or want to spend. Skiing frequently is way cheaper over time if you own your own gear. Same with climbing, biking, kayaking, surfing, etc.
Some gear you absolutely cannot rent for liability reasons, like most rock climbing gear.
It also depends on how good you get. I’ve been kayaking for 25 years and whatever I can rent down the street is not likely to work for what I typically want to do.
I don't see what the big deal is to be honest, just a harmless hobby to collect random trinkets, it gives people joy, and you can just get rid of it when they die. I don't see what the harm is
Buying random trinkets that are mass produced in a factory overseas and shipped across the ocean is not ideal.
When you fill your house with it, to the point where you're a hoarder and can't see your floors and walls, that's a health hazard that attracts dirt, rot, and pests.
Alternatively, one really should stop to think about what they care in life at least once or twice each decade.
Lots of people never do it once in their whole life. There's a world of optimization levels between "randomly doing things" and "min-maxing life". There's a huge-ass chunk of people who never leave the 0-optimization level of randomly doing things.
The son in the article, nine months into the process of clearing his parents' house, estimated he is one-third done. That's a lot of mental and physical work he inherited, or alternatively signed up for.
I cannot believe it is necessary to be so persnickety about it that it causes you stress and bitterness. Give your siblings a day to grab anything they want, then rent a dumpster and a wheelbarrow and go to town. Throw away everything you can force yourself to, one room a day. Dad's dead, he won't care. If it takes nine months, you're doing it wrong.
In that case it's a good argument for you to buy a smaller house, but if you accept that it's a matter of preference and not something that can be generalized then it's not a valid argument for other people.
Yeah I think this war on consumerism and boomer lifestyle is a bit exaggerated, and I mean, if you take away all the benefits and rewards you have to take away some of the demands too. I can recycle and share and rent and downsize if I can also downsize my working hours accordingly. A bit weird that the middle class now wants to get rid of the carrot and just have a bigger stick, that doesn't really add up for me.
> shows amazing tech skills, and talks when prompted to, I mean, will you reject this person in favour of a less stronger candidate just because that weaker candidate was more outgoing?
If they are the opposite, they will not ask questions (but instead make assumptions) and refuse to admit when they're wrong. Yes I would absolutely reject such a person regardless of technical skills, I would even fire them.
These people can have a very negative influence on the culture and turn it into a competition of ego instead of actually understanding and solving problems, which is also stopping everyone else on the team as well from actually solving problems, because this person will act as a huge blocker. Technical ability doesn't help you at all if you are insisting on solving the wrong problem.
> But in technical interviews? Just solve the thing.
Yes sure, but the issue is that there is no non-technical part.
There are entire cultures which function this way. Even in the Anglosphere, the far majority of people won't talk about most their issues until designated times and prompted by bosses.
You're overestimating the proactivity of most people, and how important that proactivity is beyond making an impression one is proactive at a job interview (read: faking it). And the willingness of others to endure what a large crowd of truly proactive people would do when constrained by a huge management overhead: complain a lot until they are fired or finally given the power to solve their own problems.
> There are entire cultures which function this way. Even in the Anglosphere, the far majority of people won't talk about most their issues until designated times and prompted by bosses.
Yeah, for example the military and factory work. But not team work environment, it does not function this way.
Upper thread already gave you the ESL example. You're taking things out of context and arguing a strawman.
Most people aren't proactive. End of. To think otherwise is to dismiss what modern schooling does to individuals and to forget the downside of proactivity: increased friction when people can't agree on what they want. If we agree communication is important, surely you're not going to dismiss the obvious that most people suck at trying to come to an agreement when everyone is trying to play proactively.
There's a reason management methodologies are so tight on synced up moments of conversation and prodding people to talk even when they themselves like there's nothing to be said. It's all to push people into talking. You can do that with reactive people. It's not optimal, but it works and is a lot more feasible than trying to create a culture with mostly proactive, total strangers who somehow agree enough not to devolve into death by committee.
You're the one who's using the straw man here to argue about why team work itself sucks and bring up that some people can't speak english.
The assumption is that you have a proactive team work environment, for example scrum, which is how the vast majority of all programmer jobs are, and that the people involved can all speak fluently in a common language.
>why team work itself sucks and bring up that some people can't speak english
The ESL argument is pulled in not because of language, but because some cultures prefer reserved people over proactive people. Not sure how you missed this.
"Why team work itself sucks" is a huge leap in logic from "reserved, reactive people can function in a team". Taking your own example, a military with bad team work would leave its country ripe for takeover.
There's nothing about software development in particular which makes reactivity dysfunctional. What is true is proactivity is preferred when applied in a certain way. Turns out many proactive people are proactive for reasons which make them butt heads whenever they disagree. Your "proactive but also collaborative" people are unicorns, because the very things which make them proactive either cause friction, or aren't rewarded appropriately.
>for example scrum
If anything, SCRUM shows exactly how we really think about proactivity. Scheduled rituals which prod people to respond, trying to get some semblance of that "proactive but collaborative" gold, only for most people to still feel suffocated by management when it turns out that proactivity includes futile efforts in telling management to change what is preventing the team from working more efficiently. You can call this dysfunctional SCRUM, misapplied or whatever you wish, but the far majority of these places still turn profits and create products despite of this.
I think it's already immoral how society punishes people for being childless when it's a natural thing and can be 100% caused by characteristics that you are born with and have no control over.