Comment by vezycash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vezycash | Hacker News Reader

Child Protection Laws:

Societal criminalization of sex with people less than 18 or 17 of old has definitely reduced birth rates.

8 year olds used to find gainful employment. By 15 or 16, these "children" were relatively self sufficient. Now, such jobs are called child labor.

Compulsory mass schooling has also pushed the average child bearing age to 30s.

Health:

Slashing infantile mortality rates has also stopped people from hedging with 5 or more children.

I don't how people perceived contraceptives in the past. However, the lowly condom has prevented lots of pregnancy.

Financial:

Cost of raising a child has sky rocketed. Child birth cost is just crazy. Cost of schooling / rearing - live time cost of a child is something people now seriously debated before giving birth. And having to change houses, and cars to accommodate the growing family is also a thing.

In undeveloped countries with poor health care, low education, child care... high birth rates is still common.

Japan 2d partners:

What's up with that country? Seems like they just became uninterested in actually having sex with actual human beings.

If having sex with animals is bestiality; having sex with dead people is necrophilia; what is sex with 2d anime girls?

>8 year olds used to find gainful employment. By 15 or 16, these "children" were relatively self sufficient.

To add to this (and because of the education bubble making higher education effectively compulsory), children aren't self-sufficient until they're 23-25. So the 15-20 years of relative freedom to live one's life at a self-sufficient stage (assuming children are had at 30-35 years of age) has narrowed down to 5-10.

There's been some creeping ageism (because of the lack of maturity that self-sufficiency and responsibility normally cultivates) which has made the problem even worse.

1958 was a record year for teenage pregnancies, and it's not hard to see why- you were guaranteed a job that paid the bills straight out of high school.

>Japan 2d partners: What's up with that country?

Massively inflated working hours. Women don't find it worthwhile to keep a partner who is only at home one day a week and emotionally available for even a fraction of that time, to speak nothing of the shrinking dating pool (since why would anyone forced to go through the absolutely insane education culture there suddenly give all that up at 25-30 to have a family?).

> children aren't self-sufficient until they're 23-25

Look at Mr. overachiever over here, moving out at 25.

Also important: children became liabilities instead of being assets. Nearly all labour which a child could contribute to has been automated or reduced.

In countries where children can be trusted with the responsibility of doing something economically useful, birth rates continue to be high.

> Cost of raising a child has sky rocketed.

No, the cost hasn’t risen much. People are just buying a standard of living for their children that didn’t exist for any human alive 150 years ago. It’s an important difference.

Okay but in practice this really isn't meaningfully different than saying the cost of raising children has increased. Social pressure/expectation is a fine explanation for such an increase even if it isn't literally mandatory.

What social pressure?

The article contains a random quote from some woman who claims she couldn't go on holiday if she had a second child. That's clearly nonsense, of course they could go on holiday if they had a second child. Maybe she'd have to stay in the UK instead of going abroad, but that's still a holiday. Likewise her view was that she wanted to buy her daughter anything she wanted and to never have to say no: that's a choice and not even necessarily a good one.

> Likewise her view was that she wanted to buy her daughter anything she wanted and to never have to say no

That’s just horrible parenting.

There is a big difference between literally not being able to feed your children and deciding not to have another child because it would mean moving to a neighborhood in a worse school district.

They are also foregoing the huge time-investment it takes.

The costs of housing has increased massively. A house from generations ago sells for orders of magnitude more than it did when it was built, even when adjusted for inflation.

Probably because only the good houses from the past are left standing. Also, have you lived in middle class houses from 100 years ago? They’re tiny.

Also brunch and day drinking are too fun to give up. To be serious, I’m a recent parent pushing 40 and I just didn’t want the responsibility. It’s just me not wanting to grow up.

>If having sex with animals is bestiality; having sex with dead people is necrophilia; what is sex with 2d anime girls?

Some would say it's the pinnacle of the society of the spectacle, in the pamphlet of the same name, Debort begins it with:

>But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.

(Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity)

Perhaps that's more relevant now in late capitalism than it was in Feuerbach's time, or maybe just in a different way. There's amazing work done inside and outside Japan on the relationship between reality and fiction, a topic which Japan has confronted in a remarkably different way to "the West" - and comes into play with the distinct ability in Japan to enjoy fiction without its real world equivalent, and to be satisfied with that much. 2D wives and the lolicon phenomenon seem to be good examples. As much as we like to talk about media normalizing the events depicted, Japan bravely (and empirically) stands in the face of it all when it comes to anime and manga.

what is sex with 2d anime girls?

Legal. The others are not (and harmful, although biologists have argued about bestiality). Its unfortunate but people are free individuals. Even in Japan citizens are not particularly concerned about what is good for the nation. Can't force people to have babies. Which is probably a good thing. Nobody wants to be an unwanted child.

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