The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
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User ID: 174
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6hr ago
Anyone older then a Millennial is a "boomer". That includes Gen-X, Silents, WWII, Lost Generation, and even the unnamed generations prior. Years from now the Zeds, Alphas and Betas will be calling the Millennials "boomers", much to their irritation.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6hr ago
Are you sure those "fertility bumps" in oil towns and military bases don't go away when age-adjusted?
Yeah, people in poor countries have lots of children. They don't have to put them in the best daycares or supervise them 24/7 until they're in school, or any of the other things Westerners do.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6hr ago
The zero-sum status competition isn't enforced by capitalism. It's part of human nature, way down in the lizard brain; some direct descendants of dinosaurs are famous for it.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
11hr ago
That's false. According to surveys, women still want to have children.
Surveys don't mean much. If women aren't having children, it's because they don't want them, they biologically can't have them, or because they can't find a man to impregnate them. Infertility happens but there's no evidence it's increased anywhere near enough to explain the drop in TFR. The last is not credible.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
11hr ago
So, no, don't try to copy the Haredi. Instead, live in the world but not of the world. Pay your taxes, but don't bilk welfare. Use computers to do your job better and to find high quality information, but not to ingest slop and ragebait. Get a job, get married, have lots of babies to solve your own TFR rate but don't worry too much about everyone else's TFR.
And watch the fruits of your labor be taken from you (and your children) to pay for everyone else (including the Haredi) to have the lifestyle of their choice while you're busting your balls to make ends meet, dodging Child Protective Services because you don't have the requisite number of car seats, etc.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
12hr ago
But you can replicate the high TFR aspects of their culture.
It comes as a set.
We can totally imagine a Haredi culture where, instead of spending 8 hours learning all the laws about separately eating milk and meat, they spend 8 hours at an Amazon Warehouse.
Working at an Amazon Warehouse is very different than studying the Torah. It's backbreaking. There are cruel bosses who expect results, and the chance of getting fired. Studying the Torah all the time is basically just the ancient Hebrew version of playing videogames.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
12hr ago
To be fair, for some of them that's not their free time, it's their career.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
12hr ago
It is obvious that the apartments are not up to code, have too many people living in them to meet occupancy maximums, and are probably covered by rental "agreements" which would be laughed out of a basic contract law course at NYU.
What if those requirements they are violating are part of the reason for the drop in fertility in the first place?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
13hr ago
The birth rate collapse is happening because young men and young women are not coupling up any more.
As the saying goes, men chase and women choose. Women are choosing not to have children.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
13hr ago
The challenge is finding a non-dysgeinc solution in an environment where having children is an objectively stupid decision on an individual level.
Putting it this way suggests another solution: Make it so having children isn't a stupid decision on an individual level. But paradoxically this means treating children as less valuable, not more, so there's no way to get there from here.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
13hr ago
Perhaps, but why give up before giving even a shadow of a try?
Because we already have. There are lots of policies which transfer money to people with children. Most directly in the US, the Earned Income Tax Credit and the tax deduction for dependents, but many, many others. As these policies have proliferated, fertility has dropped.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
13hr ago
The UBI skeptic generally agrees that there is an intelligent, open-minded, agentic elite of individuals who can flourish when left to their own devices - he simply believes that lower-IQ or otherwise mentally disadvantaged people cannot say the same, and the happiness of a fraction of clever dilettantes is not worth leaving the Average Joe to rot his brain with 24/7 video games while shoveling nachos into his mouth.
As a UBI skeptic, that's not my view. I agree that there is "an intelligent, open-minded, agentic elite of individuals who can flourish when left to their own devices". And a much larger group of people who will fit the stereotype "rot his brain with 24/7 video games while shoveling nachos into his mouth." But if UBI let everyone do what they wanted, that would be fine. I'm a skeptic because I don't believe in the implied abundance; someones going to have to produce all those nachos for the average Joe, and the videogames, and the electricity. And that's either going to be that first group, or some other group outside those mentioned -- no magic robot is going to do it for them. So you've got a group doing all the work, and a group reaping the benefits for nothing; that's not utopia, that's slavery. Talk to me about UBI when you've created the magic robots, and not before.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Obama did step over some lines that Nixon crossed, but were allegedly re-established.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
They don't want to do that either.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Very little of their studying plausibly impacts their TFR because only like 1% of the readings are about having children or getting married. If they had normal education and normal work, but retained the pro-fertility cultural elements, which is possible, then they would still have a high TFR.
Would they? If they had to work for a living, maybe they'd be less desiring of children (who, when you're a working person, cost money and make more work for you)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
This is easy to say, but very hard to demonstrate that it actually works. It certainly is not a mathematical inevitability.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
In the US the OAS-equivalent (Social Security old-age benefits) is notionally (though not actually) funded by a tax paid during your working years. This (by design) makes it hard to make the case you're making here about transfers -- it's hard to make the case that people who paid 6.2% (and whose employers paid the same) on their earnings all their life specifically for this purpose deserve nothing when they actually do reach old age.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Perhaps we could actually try to make having children the financially preferable choice instead of an immense burden relative to childlessness/having too few children before we throw up our hands and declare defeat?
We can't. Essentially everyone wants them, especially those who have children. Removing them would mean making children somehow less safe and protected. This is everything from child labor laws to car seats to occupancy restrictions (on number of children in a room) to expensive requirements on child care providers, and much more.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
The idea is to increase fertility generally, not to create some weird cult. I am skeptical that your approach would work on the small scale (trying to do ANYTHING in the Third World is difficult), and do not believe it could be scaled up at all.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
At some point, the idea will be proposed to euthanize childless elders who are not financially independent, and nobody physically capable of pushing back will be on the other side of that proposal.
Why would financial independence matter? I'm fairly sure some of the fertility-demanders here have said that old people saving money doesn't count because the actual products and services have to be provided by younger people anyway. Euthanizing the childless who do have assets also has the bonus (from the viewpoint of the euthanizers) that they get the assets away from those hated geezers and crones.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
This is a boring gotcha.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
Well it's not strictly wrong but nobody has ever found out how much money you have to offer to make it happen.
My guess is there isn't enough money in the world, unless you want to subsidize the fertility of the worst of the worst. That is, you can't transfer enough money to increase the fertility of the working class and above without reducing it among those you're taking it from more than enough to make up for it.
Better would be to reduce the cost (especially the non-delegable cost) of having children, but no one knows of a feasible way to do that. We keep doing the opposite with the expected results, and I expect there's a positive feedback loop -- as children become rarer, we insist on more parental investment per child, which discourages children even more. I call this a "K-selection spiral" (or "death spiral") -- please make this the title in any Index of Crackpot Theories.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
I was once paid to port C code from a system that allowed code to dereference null pointers (by just making the MMU allow that memory page and filling it with zeroes). And so the C code written for that system used that behavior, depending on foo = *bar;
AIX did this. I think the first three values were 0, 0xdeadbeef, 0xbadfca11. C programmers weren't supposed to depend on it -- the compiler would use it to avoid short circuiting expressions like:
myptr == NULL || (*myptr == whatever)
which would save branch overhead. And the very common
myptr == NULL || *myptr == 0
could skip the null test entirely.
But I'm sure some programers did depend on it.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
A lot of these bugs in Rust code that keep going viral are stupid. But they also stink of a programmer utterly and thoroughly tapped out fighting the borrow checker. So mentally exhausted at the endless walls put up between the simple task they have to do that they've been working through one by one, that at the end of 8 hours their judgement is so impaired they decide "Fuck it, it's just one line of code, it doesn't need to be safe."
This isn't the way safety people think. They think the problem is not that people are tired of fighting their burdensome safety measures and so bypass them; they think the problem is that it's possible to bypass their safety measures, and so see this as reason to put in more controls.
That's not my objection to Rust -- Rust was created by and is controlled by my Culture War enemies, who inject their beliefs into their actions a lot more than even Richard Stallman ever did. But it is an objection to Rust.
Forget it, she's marrying Chad Stolzfus, the son of the owner of the pretzel stand.
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