Falling birth rates is a problem in most wealthy industrialized societies.
Being up a 4am to greet my wife who's been up since 1am with a screaming child. I'm not sure exactly what kind of benefits could convince us that he needs siblings :)
Just saying, that while I certainly applaud the effort. I don't see any easy ways to fix the issue: kids are hard work, there are many other things you could do with your life.
Idk, I love children and being able to comfort kids back to sleep makes me more happy and not annoyed, I’d choose children over a better vacation or a car, I’m not sure why our generation in most countries stopped caring about children.
Until this, people would dedicate their lives to their kids, children were the most important thing in people’s lives, everything from friends, to outings, to day to day life, would revolve around the child’s best interests and wants.
I’m not sure why this link broke, across every major country. Was it the internet ? What was it, even people from less fortunate backgrounds are having fewer kids, like a LOT LESS, what changed, its not about religion, even the religious are having fewer kids (more than non-religious) but still fewer,
It’s truly a big question, my guess is it has something to do with, increasing the avg age of marriage by 10 yrs from 20 to 30, and making pre-marital sex available in-cheap for everyone, before you’d need to get married to be able to sleep with the opposite gender.
> Until this, people would dedicate their lives to their kids, children were the most important thing in people’s lives, everything from friends, to outings, to day to day life, would revolve around the child’s best interests and wants.
Is this actually true? I don’t really believe it. Sending your kids to work in the sweatshops doesn’t seem like “best interests and wants.” I think people were just surviving in their time/environment. Like we are now.
its a complete lie. In the 70s we were treated like luggage. shoved in the back of the station wagon, inhaling cigarette smoke from dad, and playing at construction sites. Im not kidding, that was the affluent kid.
> I’d choose children over a better vacation or a car
I don’t think the burden of children is experienced only financially. I suspect at least some people are choosing sleep, peace, and freedom over children. Not [primarily] luxury goods.
Industrialized countries generally have high cost of living. It is much more common for both parents to work than 50 years ago. Also, for many, a career involves moving away from parents, grandparents, and siblings. This all leads to a vastly reduced safety net compared to what was common for most of human history. It is probably unlikely that government could ever fill that void. Eventually, high prices will cure high prices. But, the methods, timescale, and pleasantness in the intervening time is anybody’s guess.
This has been parenting for the last several thousand years.
I say this not to be flippant or sarcastic but rather to ask how our ancestors seemed fine with the above but we seem less so?
(To be fair, I have 3 kids and totally get why your scenario might lower the odds. I'll say that even with the 1am wakeups, the "I love you!" from a toddler is one of the best feelings ever.)
~40% of US and international pregnancies, annually, are unintended. When unintended pregnancies are prevented, there are less children. Educated, empowered women have less children or no children. Desired fertility is less than replacement rate, broadly speaking.
> ask how our ancestors seemed fine with the above but we seem less so?
Maybe they weren’t fine with it. They just didn’t have any other choice. Now we do, and turns out a lot of people choose not to have kids when given the choice.
Honestly, I think we will have a rough couple generations, then nature will take its course and humans will reach a new equilibrium that factors in birth control.
It’s only a choice if you live purely for yourself. It’s the job of the state to make short sighted, self absorbed thinking like this unpalatable since people can only think in self absorbed, short term ways.
I think multi generation housing helped where older generations took care of the child when parents were working, that both parents were not necessarily working, and that kids did not need constant supervision in the sense that they could be left to run around as long as you lived outside major urban centers.
> I say this not to be flippant or sarcastic but rather to ask how our ancestors seemed fine with the above but we seem less so?
Because by and large our female ancestors raised the children, were offered no choice in whether to raise the children, and their opinions of the situation were not recorded.
I believe the answer is that there is far more interesting things to do with your life. It's quite easy to imagine a life where you're occupied up to your mid thirties with things like university, starting a career in a field you're actually interested in, maybe moving locations once or twice, travelling, working overseas. This plays out even at the relationship level: people in their 20's are far less committal, and prefer the freedom to explore what life has to offer.
Compare this to even just 50 years ago. These options were limited to the highest classes of society. People tended to settle down and have children because that was the sensible next thing to do in life.
I did all of this by 30 and started a family shortly after this. Kids are hard (I have two), but I wouldn't change anything.
I know multiple single people in their 50s and 60s with no kids and they are all miserable human beings.
Another issue is that most of your peers at that age are raising a family and have less time to get together, making it very lonely. If you wait long enough, your friends will retire/kids will move out and they will have time for you again.
This doesn't even include the elderly people with no kids that end up alone in a nursing home one day.
What about the elderly people with kids that end up alone in nursing homes?
I know a few people in the 50s and 60s with no kids and they are perfectly nice and happy. I also know parents who are real shit bags. Let’s stop this false narrative that people without kids are miserable or selfish or evil in some way. We are all just people, kids or no.
Multi-generational families with tighter communities spreading the work.
My parents grew up spending a lot of time with their aunts and uncles. I grew up with my parents because they didn't have extended family or friends that could help. Now my generation, I see at least more "family circles" sharing in child care (eg Friday sleepovers at one rotating family, so the other parents can go out). I can't imagine how easy it would be if more grandparents were nearby.
Plus it was just cheaper to live back then. Now the norm is both parents work full time to stay barely above water economically, maximizing shareholder value.
Single person centuries ago was a weird wizard who was probably secretly communicating with a devil and should be exiled from the village just in case. Or he would just die from the lack of help during the illness or trauma. And most certainly he would starve, from not being able to grow food he requires. Those people didn't have an alternative for kids.
for the last several thousand years it's been a matter of survival, a help in the fields and your social security, and with a crazy high mortality, had to have many
it's objectively hard work that nowadays may not even pay off at all, aside from this feelings part, which to me always has been balanced out with acute paranoia about being responsible for a fragile live human.
With siblings of similar age, it's much harder in the first 2-3 years (external help is essential), but then the kids considerably shortcircuit to each other, so it becomes easier than having just one, constantly bored child.
Source: I am a father of two daughters with less than 2 years difference; and my brother is also less than 2 years apart from me. So, I lived my advice in both aspects: as a parent and as a child.
Not sure if you have access to affordable child care and parental PTO (after birth but also “my kid is sick I need to stay home” type of PTO). It makes everything a lot more manageable.
With the expectation of both parents working full time jobs and living in small spaces (at least in big cities like in Japan) - the current state of modern urban life is just not right to have kids. Where are they even going to run around and play.
>Falling birth rates is a problem in most wealthy industrialized societies.
The most fascinating part of this is that, against income, fertility is a bathtub-shaped curve. The poorest and richest have the most kids, which the middle class drags the whole nation down.
I get the feeling many have this idea that the more educated /career-oriented you are, the more you delay kids or have less of them. But that is not the case, past a certain point. Look up any of your favorite elite celebrities for example and how many kids they have. They might never talk about them, but I’d bet most of who you look up have 3+
A lot of people can afford nannies. I think it’s more that parents want to raise their kids really well. As opposed to, “what happens, happens.” So naturally you want to do that yourself.
This is pure speculation, but I imagine after you attain a certain degree of wealth, you just hand the kids over to someone and give them a paycheck. Certain megabillionaires in the US have loads of kids and they're treated like goldfish. They're nice decorations for your photo ops, but otherwise, you just pay someone to visit your house and feed them a couple times a day. And it doesn't matter whether you have 1 or 12 because they're all fed at once anyways.
Not just wealthy industrialised societies any more.
Nowadays it’s basically just sub-Saharan Africa keeping the global birth rate up. Even India may now have just dropped below 2.1 along with nearly all of South East Asia.
having kids connects you to humanity like nothing else… I don’t think you must have kids to have a great life or anything like that but with all the hard work (the 1am will pass soon and you’ll talk to your wife how unfair would be to your son/daughter to deprive her/him of experiencing sibling love :) ) it is worth it for the full connection to human existence.
You have to listen to crying and lose some sleep for a couple of weeks? You’re an adult, this is possibly the most self absorbed and shortsighted thinking I seen in a while.
Weeks? Try years. As a parent of a newborn, I can confidently say that my wife hasn't had a full night's sleep for even one night since the kid was born in early July - she watches the kid at night (we live in a one bedroom apartment with the crib in our room - it affects me, too, but I try to tune it out and focus on sleep, as breadwinner). She also watches the kid all day while I work (9-11 hours). She's drained. I don't see this getting any easier for at least 12 months. It's a long road.
We don't have family to support us and we can't afford childcare. So, that's our situation. Not complaining, just saying - it's not weeks of a little bit less sleep. It's chronically interrupted sleep for months, maybe years (according to Dr. Ferber), with severe affects to hormonal regulation and mood and weight.
I hope not, three-month-olds are supposed to sleep 14-17 hours a day. Also, what happened when they dropped naps? Night sleep typically worsens right beforehand, as the residual nap pushes their lengthening wake window into night sleep. How did you manage their congestion when they were sick? Many kids, especially those using a pacifier, lose the ability to link their short, 45-minute sleep cycles and need to be comforted throughout the night even into toddlerhood.
No direct experience, but I recently read[1] Brother HL-L3220CW counts printed pages, and refuses to print after a set number of pages, even if there's still toner in the cartridge. Some models have a way to reset the page count but this one apparently does not.
Does the printer also refuse to print when using toners not part of the EcoPro subscription, though? Or is this just another case of people expecting their subscription toners/cartridges to last beyond their payment? I can't blame them, the marketing is sneaky about it, I just see it often on threads about HP.
The post did mention the other toners that came with the printer also locked, but I think I remember reading elsewhere that those printers are cheaper precisely because they come with EcoPro-only toners in the box.
I've only made good experiences with laser printers, from very small ones to full-sized copy machines. Some of the more expensive inkjet printers are reportedly also quite good. You are still stuck with the usual horror show that is software from hardware companies, but otherwise it's not so bad. And the occasional paper jam, but 3d printers are no better in terms of reliability
The bad reputation is just from HP's tactic to sell printers cheaper than everyone else, in more stores than anyone else, then make the money back with the scummiest tactics imaginable.
I think it's little appreciated that planets solve many of the practical problems of feed crawling.
If you wanted to follow 2000 blogs yourself you'd find it is really a hassle. You can follow one planet and its easy.
For that matter, if 2000 people want to follow your blog (and many other blogs) they are going to generate 2000 requests per polling period. It is not wonder why people like [1] get so exasperated. There are three kinds of polling periods: (1) too fast, (2) too slow, (3) both at the same time. Instead of having 2000 people poll your blog too often, one planet can poll your blog. It improves the scalability and economics of the system dramatically.
(e.g. the difficulty of finding a good polling regime is one of 10 or 20 or so unappreciated reasons why RSS has remained nerdcore)
Data point 3: does not work for me. Also using NetNewsWire. “Throttled or blocked” changes nothing, if it’s down for half of visitors then it’s down for half of visitors. I highly doubt NetNewsWire is breaching spec or poorly behaved. I bet rachelbythebay is just throttling by IP address and really has a 24 hour limit of exactly 1, so only one person per IP per day can subscribe.
I'm on the Feedly train boat too since the sinking of Google Reader. Besides the ai bs it doesn't really let you search something in your feeds without a subscription, so once I tried Feedbin.
But I went back because third world issues (and not a fan of microtransactions either) I could not find a way (if any) to change the layout on desktop. I really like the minimal list view at Feedly (and even on mobile too).
big fan of feedmail [1] for a "dumb" reader. It just delivers it to your inbox. I have a folder set up called "feed" and I can do all the email things to the items landing in that folder. Every email costs a credit, you can buy 10 000 credits for $10, which works out to $0.001 per article.
The only thing it misses is any sort of highlight saving deal, but for those I just save the article to zotero and annotate it there.
We don't want fast fixes. Things change, building materials could change, fire fighting methods could improve etc. If we can send the right signal via the right price for the risk, people can react accordingly to either reduce or avoid the problem.
> people can react accordingly to either reduce or avoid the problem.
Yes, but lots of people won't be consider all factors when buying a house.
Prices are high, houses aren't on the market long, when you do find a house that matches your criteria, are you going to consider if it's safe from floods, fires, earth quakes, etc?
You're already factoring in schools, distance to work, shopping options, etc.
Not to mention the fact that you're mostly worried about whether the house has mold, termites, pest, or construction deflects, how long time to the roofing need to be replaced.
Asking normal people to factor in natural disaster probabilities is difficult.
Maybe, it's better to not allow construction is such places through zoning.
I bet most home buyers spend more time looking for pests, mold, leaky pipes, etc, than they do investigating wild fire risks.
Home buyers don't need to investigate wild fire risk - the need to check the price of insurance in the area (assuming it's priced without distortions). If the insurance looks insanely expensive, people can either walk away, accept it, or look into how to change it.
> The other way the world is becoming uninsurable is much of what we take for granted--abundant, affordable resources, products, food and fuel, for example--is not guaranteed, and cannot be insured by political or technological means.
Fuel is not guaranteed, but renewables, batteries, heat pumps, EVs and possible nuclear does increasingly give us a technological option for ensuring power.
It's fair to ask if economics will drive us to adopt these technologies on a wide enough scale before we run out.
I’m not sure how heat pumps and batteries “ensure power”. Building far more nuclear would create green jobs, high paying jobs, and ensure widespread power, but the current trend is to close nuclear power plants and burn natural gas instead.
I suspect the kinds of salaries that's possible in Silicon Valley only happens because:
(A) Skills are fairly transferable.
(B) There is a lot of employers competing for workers.
(C) An awful lot of value is created along the way.
If you specialize in some tiny part of chip manufacturing, there aren't many places you can transfer your skills.
Even if, in the future, you have multiple chip vendors. They won't all use the same processes, and you might only fit into one role at each of these businesses.
Maybe it's not that simple. But few chip companies have to compete against startups for workers. And that probably won't change.
Not saying the jobs can't be well paid, just that it's not unlikely that it won't be absurd SV level salaries.
> Maybe it's not that simple. But few chip companies have to compete against startups for workers. And that probably won't change.
It seems like what EE needs is something similar to open source, so that does happen.
The way things like Google or AWS got started is they started with Linux and built something on top of it, so it could be a startup because they don't first have to build the world in order to make a contribution, and they're not building on top of someone else's land.
There isn't any reason that couldn't inherently work in EE. Get some universities or government grants to publish a fully-open spec for some processors that could be fabbed by TSMC or Intel. Not as good as the state of the art, but half as good anyway.
Now people have a basis for EE startups. You take the base design and tweak it some for the application, so that it's a startup-sized job instead of a multinational-sized job, and now you've got EE startups making all kinds of phone SoCs and NVMe drives and Raspberry Pi competitors and whatever else they think can justify a big enough production run to send it to a fab and sell it to the public.
An interesting license for this could be something along the lines of: You can make derivative works, but you have to release them under the same license within five years. In other words, you get five years to make money from this before it goes into the commons, which gives you the incentive to do it while keeping the commons rich so the next you can do it again tomorrow.
The startup costs are probably astronomically higher for a startup doing custom chips. Even if you're fabless.
There is probably also a lot fewer customers.
There is no shortage of businesses and private people who need a CRUD app to track something. We probably won't run out anytime soon :)
And even then, there is probably also a long list of factories that would like to automate something using robots and software.
How many use cases for custom SOCs are there really?
It's a lot cheaper to customize the software, than it is to customize the hardware. Which is kind of the point.
RISC-V is the ISA, which is a solid first step. What you need is a production-ready fully open source whole device, so that someone who wants to fork it only has to change the parts they need to be different instead of having to also re-engineer the missing components.
I'm actually not sure that fcgi is that bad, even for other languages, but most shared hosts will probably limit what you can do in terms of resources.
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