Crowstep
2mo ago
I'm leaning towards the second explanation. WW1 wasn't exactly short of patriotism, so I think we can assume that returning soldiers would be in a relatively similar situation to Romans. The difference is that Romans didn't spend months sitting in damp trenches with constant explosions, with the knowledge that if one hits you, you'll either be ripped apart or buried alive.
Crowstep
2mo ago
Looks like it's age 12 or 135cm (4' 5"), whichever comes first. The internet tells me that on average this is at age ten for boys and age nine for girls. Still crazy, of course.
Crowstep
2mo ago
my home state of Pennsylvania doesn't allow kids to go without one until the age of 8!
Meanwhile, in the land of 'you got a loicence for that?' kids are required to have a car seat until they're 12! (Although I just learned that there is an exception for families with three children which seems sensible)
Plus we have the lowest nursery teacher to child ratio in Europe so childcare is crazy expensive. It's like they don't want us to have children! (I say that flippantly, the real culprit is safetyism).
Crowstep
2mo ago
It's very hard to avoid seeing yourself relative to the rest of the world you live in.
I think it's because we care about the status that materials goods can afford far more than the goods themselves. The Roman emporer is poor in terms of what stuff he can access, but he is famous and powerful and has many slaves and hangers-on.
That's what people mean when they say they 'can't afford children', they worry that having children would eat into their positional status goods like holidays, clothes, cars and dining out. Food and clothing are dirt cheap, but plane tickets don't discount in bulk. Children can share bedrooms, but that might make you look poor. Because we don't afford status to parents in any meaningful way, having kids is a drop in status for most people.
Crowstep
2mo ago
These surveys suggest that this is changing. I think you're right that it's still pretty low, but the Google Trends links I posted do suggest that awareness is growing, and we can only expect that to increase as birth rates continue to decline and governments become even more panicked.
Crowstep
2mo ago
Honestly that sounds like a dream, lots of leisure time, surrounded by little people who love me, no work stress. Of course, in the real world women dislike outearning their husbands and hate being the sole breadwinner, so perhaps a better question would be to ask if WhiningCoil would be willing to do this if he were a woman, or if women's marital preferences were different.
Crowstep
2mo ago
and Africa's fertility is still declining
This is the big question, how quickly is this happening.
The MICS-2021 survey in Nigeria showed TFR falling from 5.8 to 4.6 in only five years. The 2021 USAID survey showed a drop from 6.1 to 4.8 in ten years. If the MICS trend holds, Nigeria could be below replacement fertility in only ten years.
Combine this with a hypothesised fertility rebound due to Darwinian selection, and the fertilty map 20 years from now could look very different indeed (although obviously massive amounts of fertility will already be baked in, with young populations in Africa and extremely old populations in countries like Korea).
Crowstep
2mo ago
Not directly responding to your point, but it really feels like 2024 is the year that concern about birth rates and pronatalism broke into the mainstream. Looking at Google trends, it looks like news searches for 'birth rate' have increased pretty massively in the past ten years. Web searches for pronatalism have also increased a lot in the last two years.
Is it simply that birth rates have finally dropped so much that more governments are taking notice (outside of Eastern Europe and East Asia)? Is it that future-thinking intellectuals picked it up and the rest of the world is following? Did these guys make it happen?
Maybe fertility doomerism will become the right-wing version of left-wing climate doomerism?
Crowstep
2mo ago
And here's a response to EndWokeness that proves the point, unless you think seamstresses and makeup artists are critical social infrastructure that are miserable to perform.
She's...in on the joke, right? She can't possibly believe that 'bridal shop owner' is a similarly essential job as plumber?
Crowstep
2mo ago
This article suggests that yes, the recent court ruling has unbound the hands of city officials to clear up these encampments, at least in San Francisco.
In July, Mayor London Breed promised that the city would conduct “very aggressive” encampment sweeps in August following the U.S. Supreme Court Grants Pass ruling, which allowed cities to conduct sweeps without offers of shelter.
Breed said the city would still offer shelter before dismantling encampments, and that the goal of the sweeps was to make life “so uncomfortable on the streets of San Francisco that they have to take our offer.”
During the sweeps, city officials have thrown away homeless people’s belongings, and have encouraged homeless people to leave San Francisco by giving them bus tickets. Mission Local documented several encampment clearings in the Mission and Bayview, finding that some homeless people were arrested, and that residents returned to their old haunts after just a few days.
Homelessness has become a staple of the campaign trail ahead of the November election. Breed has promised a tougher hand with those living on the streets, saying that the city will still lead with “compassion,” but that repeated refusals to take shelter may result in arrest.
Crowstep
2mo ago
Your understanding of the Baby Boom isn't quite right. It wasn't caused by WW2 (indeed, in the US, UK and Switzerland it started before the war) and it also occurred in countries that weren't involved in the war (like Ireland). Plus, it wasn't a case of delaying or bringing births forward. For the Baby Boom mothers, their lifetime fertility actually increased.
This article is a really good write up. TLDR: Childbirth became much safer, domestic work became easier due to new technology and there was a housing boom, which caused a marriage boom.
To answer Jeroboam initial question, my plan would be:
- Build lots of houses, specifically suburbs. Tokyo shows us that cheaper housing won't cause more people to have children if they don't have gardens and quiet.
- Glorify motherhood a la Mongolia
- Promote marriage like Hungary
- Promote free-range parenting. Modern parents spend a huge amount of time on childcare, far more than they did in the Baby Boom. Free range parenting lowers the cost of having kids, while also being psychologically healthier for the children.
- Give generous tax breaks to parents and married couples, coupled with tax-rises on singletons. We want to make getting married a rational economic choice.
- Drastically shorten the educational track. Limit university enrolment to about 10% of each cohort, and make it legally difficult for firms to list it as a job requirement. Maybe tax university graduates or give tax breaks to businesses employing non-graduates.
Crowstep
2mo ago
I've been listening to it today, I'm enjoying it! Reminds me a lot of 30 Second to Mars.
Crowstep
2mo ago
We had women's education and contraception during the Baby Boom, and birth rates rose across the developed world. Hell, the Amish have basic women's (and men's) education and contraception right now and they still have high fertility.
Crowstep
2mo ago
Looks like the police have arrested a man who was 'known to authorities'.
Could be an Islamist, or maybe a 2000s-style atheist edgelord like in Norway, or maybe just a guy who likes fire.
Crowstep
2mo ago
Ok, buddy, every old Oxbridge family just has superior genetics.
Who are these old Oxbridge families?
The royals themselves are split between St Andrews, Exeter, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Cambridge. Hugh Grosvenor, the archetypical old money aristocrat, went to Newcastle.
But that's besides the point, the fact is that university admissions in the UK are handled by either:
a) disinterested bureaucrats who don't care who your father is and are only looking at your grades
b) academics who care intensely about how smart next year's undergraduate class is going to be
The main reason US universities engage in legacy admissions is to ensure donations from wealthy families. UK universities really only started chasing after donors the way American universities do about ten years ago. There aren't any legacy children to admit because the whole thing of children going to their parents Alma Mater just isn't a thing here.
Oxbridge are in fact more meritocratic than most UK universities, because they interview as well as relying on how well you did in school.
Crowstep
2mo ago
better to cut a deal with them where both sides refrain from bombing each other rather than fighting a war whose objective will never be fulfilled
That was pretty much the situation before the war. Israel was starting to let Gazans cross the border to work, there were a few rocket attacks which engendered similarly small responses from Israel, but mostly things were peaceful...
Then Hamas stormed across the border, taking hostages and killing everyone they didn't take. With the woefully optimistic plan that this attack would set off a country wide pogrom and rid the Holy Land of Jews forever.
Why would Hamas agree to return to the status quo that they chose to violate? Because Gazan civilians are dying? Hamas wants Gazan civilians to die, because it legitimises their position and delegitimises Israel.
Crowstep
2mo ago
My read is that he's using 'violence' in the same way that campus protestors do, to mean things that make the accuser feel attacked. In this case, women humiliating their menfolk in public (which is obviously bad and can shade into abuse, but isn't violence).
Crowstep
2mo ago
They kept recycling the same crap in their little clique of Jewish Hollywood elites and refused to listen to any criticism.
You can't blame the Jews for this. It's a global thing.
Crowstep
2mo ago
Ultimately, Hollywood is there to make money. Since activists will keep pushing and pushing until someone stops them, I guess it was inevitable that eventually there would be pushback from the viewers and therefore those who hold the purse-strings. When Disney spends $180 million on four hours of television, even they are going to care if nobody watches it. When Amazon spends $700 million on a series that gets outwatched by a car man running a farm badly, the business people notice these things.
One benefit of the streaming age is that series don't need to appeal to everyone, they just need to appeal to their market. If modern political correctness was as strong during the linear TV age, it could have been worse. We only had four channels to choose between when I was growing up, I can't imagine how it would have been if every single one of them was forced to include 1/4 black people in every Regency drama or sassy girlbosses or an inexplicably large number of gays.
I think the future of streaming is like Youtube. Hyper-specific niches and sub-brands determined by the algorithm. Sure, there won't be a common media culture, but that ship has already sailed anyway.
Crowstep
2mo ago
My prediction is that we'll see more enthusiasm for cycling in general (and therefore for cycle lanes) as electric bikes become cheaper and more popular. The world is getting more urban and more childless. For urban singletons and DINKs, commuting by electric bike can make a lot more sense than by car.
I'm also seeing more segregated cycle lanes in UK cities which are obviously far superior to the kind that drivers can park on.
Crowstep
2mo ago
The MAIN (!) /r/Canada subreddit is filled, filled with nothing but messages about how the immigration is just too much and how the Liberals have ruined and destroyed the country.
Wow, you weren't kidding. 11/25 of those posts are directly about immigration.
Also, half the sidebar is in French, c'est trop mignon!
Crowstep
2mo ago
many people use the word "woman" to refer to a person who is male (including themselves)
many people who describe themselves as lesbians are male
many female people who describe themselves as lesbians or bisexual have never been in a romantic or sexual relationship with a female person
many female people who describe themselves as lesbians have been in a past romantic or sexual relationship with a male person (a sufficiently common phenomenon that the term "gold star lesbian" was coined to describe the subset of lesbians who've never had sex with a man - the converse is very common as many female people take some time to fully understand their own desires)
many female people who describe themselves as lesbians are currently in a romantic or sexual relationship with a male person (who may or may not also describe himself as female)
These are all weasel words. 'Many' could mean 0.001% (which still ends up being thousands of people since we're dealing with nationwide statistics).
I honestly don't believe that 1, 2, 3 and 5 have any significant effect on the numbers. 4 could well do, but the onus is on you to show that, not to preemptively dismiss a survey whose results you evidently don't like. After all, if we take the 'definitions aren't 100% clear' approach to any other survey we could perform the same kind of muddying the waters on its results.
Crowstep
2mo ago
My point is that the data are equally consistent with the alternative hypothesis
I would say that the data are potentially consistent with your hypothesis, but I certainly wouldn't say they are equally consistent. If you're determined to find an explanation for lesbians reporting the highest rates of domestic violence victimisation, without accepting that lesbians might be perpetrating the largest amount of domestic violence, then your hypothesis can seem plausible. To me, it looks like an isolated demand for rigour.
This article gives victimisation numbers of 66% 61% for bisexual women, 44% for lesbians and 35% for straight women. It does cite its sources but when I crtl+F for 66 I can't find anything, frustratingly. I think its citing this study. Pages 1&2 have the headline figures which match up.
Do trampoline nets reduce the incidence of serious injuries? (I don't really care about minor injuries like sprained ankles).
This study states that, of children taken to hospital due to trampoline injuries, there was no difference between those whose trampolines had nets and those who did not in terms of the percentage who received severe injuries. Therefore
But reading it makes me think of this famous picture about selection bias. Could it simply be that many children who would have received injuries, serious or not, didn't get injured because their trampoline had a net?
The again, this study suggests that the introduction of safety features like nets and pads didn't actually make any difference in the number of different categories of injury (at least during the study period). Amazingly, this includes falling off, which you'd think is the one thing that nets would prevent.
I grew up with a net-less trampoline (although it did have cushions covering the springs) and I'd like my kids to enjoy the same, but I can imagine my wife being pretty pissed off if we get an old-fashioned trampoline and someone breaks an arm. I'm not sure how amenable she'd be to the 'risky play is necessary for healthy psychological development' argument if our child has a bone sticking out of his arm.
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