lobstersalad
4mo ago
The lack of preparedness seems more like a myth than fact. It looks like they already had ads ready to go and are outspending her 25 to 1.
lobstersalad
10mo ago
I agree that a mandatory retirement age for elected officials could happen in the near future based on what’s happening with the 2024 election. Similar to how limiting the president to two terms wasn’t put into the constitution until FDR broke tradition by running for four terms, Biden’s age (and Trump’s to a lesser extent) represents a serious risk to the country.
While neither of these men are as feeble/sick other side likes to portray, four years in an extremely high stress job for men who would be in their mid/early eighties respectively could end catastrophically. There’s a serious chance that whoever wins in 2024 is removed from office by their cabinet sometime in the next term due to age related cognitive decline. And the damage that’s done before that happens in a bad scenario could be significant.
lobstersalad
11mo ago
It’s true, and I don’t see any good reason why this would change but the future is always uncertain. I couldn’t have predicted 2024 ten or fifteen years ago
That said I think the role of religion in fertility might even be underestimated. I know I know anecdotal evidence but I see so many families with 4+ kids at church and knowing what birth rates are like these days thats very unusual in the general population. According to this women who attend religious services weekly or more are right at replacement with 2.1 kids per woman, while women who never attend are 1.3. Women who sometimes attend are in the middle. And this pattern has persisted for at least 40 years in the US so it’s a reasonably good bet that it’ll continue.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/americas-growing-religious-secular-fertility-divide
lobstersalad
11mo ago
This is the most plausible explanation I’ve seen. It was perhaps really a marriage boom driven by upward mobility from men and increasing divergence between male and female wages in favor of men. Sadly it’s also probably the bleakest explanation in terms of future demographics given that people are getting married less and less and women are pulling away from men in college enrollment
lobstersalad
11mo ago
My great grandparents and my wife’s great grandparents were born in the same decade. My great grandparents had one son, who had two children, two grandchildren, and only one great grandchild (working on fixing that!) Her great grandparents had five children, all of whom had huge numbers of kids, the lowest was 5 and the highest was 11.
Same ethnic group and religion too although her side actually practiced. Couples of the same era but one side has almost no living descendants and one has hundreds. Crazy. How do people ensure they’re on the side that actually reproduces if you can’t afford or don’t want to have 5+ kids?
lobstersalad
11mo ago
One thing I genuinely wonder about re: current and future birthrates is if the selection pressures stay relatively consistent. People always talk about the current bottleneck selecting for people who still choose to reproduce under modernity but do those selection pressures change too quickly to effectively select for anything? Things have changed so radically culturally and technologically just in my short lifetime. Are current births selecting for the same type of personalities as in the 2000s? What about now vs the 2030s and 40s? Maybe the type of personality that become DINKs in the 2020s would’ve had four kids in 1990 or will in 2040. For example right now (in the US at least) actually practicing a religion makes one much more likely to reproduce but could that reverse?
I genuinely don’t know. It makes it even harder to make any serious predictions
lobstersalad
1yr ago
As a long time lurker (but posted back on Reddit) I like the thread but have the same complaint with it that I have with Reddit, I would like to more easily be able to surf original posts. It’s kind of a drag to have to scroll past comment chain after comment chain to get to a new post. In that sense it would be better to not have most content in one thread, it would be easier to find new content .
It’s entirely possible there’s a way to do this and I just don’t know how since I don’t use Reddit basically at all and this site is kind of a clone
I think about this whenever I see “protestors” shut down highways. If there was a 100% guarantee of no police involvement whatsoever the commuters would physically move them out of the way within a few minutes. But if you did that you’d be arrested and lose your job. Functionally the police are there to protect those obstructing traffic and falsely imprisoning people.
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