Make America Date Again
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
If you want more kids work on affordable housing, decreased costs for healthcare, decreased costs for college, and decreased costs for childcare.
Inflation happens when the money supply grows faster than the productive capacity of a country. And few, if any, things are more important for productive capacity than a young workforce.
Or think about it from the other direction. Suppose the country was "fiscally responsible" and had lots of money to support retirees. But if there is nobody of working age, then those retirees will be spending lots of money on their needs and wants. Without workers to supply those needs and wants the prices will get quickly bid up. Aka inflation.
Meaning daycare? IIRC, they are already tax deductible to a point (see: Dependent Care FSA).
But it's interesting and kind of depressing that the solution is always to make it easier and cheaper to shove kids into institutional settings, because the assumption that the gaping maw of capitalism must consume a maximum amount of every adults' time and energy is unquestioned.
Institutionalizing childcare is the best for capitalism, because it captures the parents' time with paid work and creates a product to suck up their money with. Too bad about the kids, though. Capitalism comes first.
At a cap of $5,000, the dependent care FSA does not even cover 2 months of daycare for my daughter, and the tax savings amount to less than two weeks of care.
It was marvelous to spend time crafting a profile that was tailored to the kind of people you wanted to meet and to read profiles that were written the same way by others for you.
I found the section with questions that you could answer and provide context for to give me insight into prospective dates and I felt like the percent match was actually accurate.
I'm curious about government run dating sites but I have low expectations. Not because I think that the government couldn't pull off a dating app in theory, I just don't know how they would market it and if it would be a hit and reach a sufficient network effect to work.
I'd be more open to the government forcing dating sites to open up their algorithms and do away with horrific dark patterns.
I've been talking to my friends about this and we've all agreed that online dating is a complete waste of time, we're looking at stuff like speed dating and group activities in real life instead.
The swipe left or swipe right UI is absolute garbage and having to pay to get boost the chances that your profile is even seen is indicative of the primary purpose of these apps.
Today ROI on a child is always negative. Members of modern society have no rational reasons to have children and I think most people innately know it but are unable to put their finger on it.
What are you going to do with all that money when you die?
I feel western society has lost many of these but you see these concepts upheld in immigrant families in the US.
With no intent to disparage women, I think the "baby crazies" are very real. My wife and I got married in our early twenties, enjoyed a few child-free years, but then they hit hard. In her mid-twenties, it became very clear that there was no way my wife would be happy if we didn't have kids, and ROI had nothing to do with it.
Even when there might have been a positive ROI for having kids, I'm pretty sure that nobody looked at it primarily in that way.
For that kind of money, you should get bottle service. For that kind of money, you can get bottle service.
> For that kind of money, you should get bottle service. For that kind of money, you can get bottle service.
For that kind of money, they should probably just pay an escort to date you and make it look like a match. Wasn't Eliot Spitzer was pay that kind of money for his escorts?
Since 2000 the percentage of US couples who met online has grown from 10% to >50%. In that time, the divorce rate has shrunk from 4% to 2.5%.
There's a lot of complaining about dating apps. When offline dating was the norm people complained about it endlessly as well. Offline dating also produced an enormous number of unhappy couples. The online dating experience has its own set of frustrations and poor outcomes - many of which don't occur offline - but people continue to choose it over offline alternatives. I've been reading articles like this one for years. They haven't stopped the percentage of couples who met online from increasing.
People tend to aim their complaints about online dating at companies like Match Group. When they complain about offline dating, though, those complaints can only be directed at the culture - there is no corporate entity who is responsible for making approaching strangers at a bar intimidating and potentially humiliating.
> In Tokyo, the city government is even releasing its own dating app, part of a campaign called Tokyo Futari Story ("futari" means couple). The service, which the city has budgeted several million dollars to develop and promote, will require users to verify their income, prove they're unmarried, sit for an interview with the app's staff, and sign a statement saying they're intent on getting married.
The last sentence is the critical one. Matchmakers who vet their clients intent tend to have much higher success rates than those who let anyone participate. A city government can also enact consequences on liars in ways that private companies cannot. We'll see how Tokyo's experiment plays out.
Correction: the 4.0 and 2.5 figures are per 1000 people, so 0.4% and 0.25%
Note: it actually dropped a little further to 2.4 in 2022.
To clarify, it's not that 0.24% of marriages end in divorce. The number is derived by dividing all divorces by all people (apparently excluding CA, HI, IN, MI, and NM).
See: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/marriage-divorce.htm
That's also not really the number most people care about, though, which is the percentage of marriages which end in divorce. Sadly, I had no luck finding definitive data on that. Rather, I've seen claims as high as >50% and some as low as 33% for first marriages, with subsequent marriages growing significantly from there, but even when it seems to come from a semi-reputable source like a well-known newspaper, the actual citations are usually more sketchy, so I'd take those figures with a wheelbarrow of salt.
At least in the US, that feels like trickle down economics.
From my POV, the larger detractors to having children are financial “safety” aspects much more than “dating is hard”. From a 1st person view “I need to save a lot of money because in retirement, I will depend only on the money I saved”. Or “I am one medical issue away from having my savings wiped”. Or “daycare / education for my kid is so expensive that it’ll eat a huge chunk into my available cash flow”
I believe if we want more families (and families to have more children) as a society (acting through the government) we need to alleviate those issues. You don’t need to make having children _free_. But the more affordable you make it, the more people will choose it.
There's a front-page post about ghost jobs right now:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42010130
(one could argue that that's another kind of slot machine)
The perfect replacement already exists and it's OkCupid circa 2006. A giant database of genuinely interesting questions and a way to display other users who share similar answers. The method works, but it's not as dopamine rich and thus monetizable as swiping.
Still, I believe there's potential. No one's tried making a dating service backed by the fediverse as far as I know, and an OkVerse would be a fun weekend project.
However for straight people it was previously not too difficult to find a partner as there was a lot of straight people around you in most places and it was fairly easy to figure out where you stood in the dating market likely only had a handful of candidates to realistically choose from.
Dating apps have instead basically provided an overwhelming amount of choice and there is little in the way of immediate feedback in how you stand in that dating market. Men tend to become less choosy just trying their chances with as many women as possible, which then means women end up with so much incoming attention they start to increase their standards to have any attempt to filter these incoming requests.
You would need to design a system that had some kind of cost for a right swipe for men and maybe it increases in cost for each right swipe basically to force them to become more selective and not spam right swipes and maybe women would need to pay for selection filters or something.
I thought of a dating app in which I would charge a hefty ($1000 usd) initial fee, and return a percentage daily until I found the right partner for you.
That way our objectives will be aligned.