JPKab

I agree. I think that paid parental leave and then later, paid daycare is an amazing investment of government resources. If we diverted a fraction of what we spend on retirees who had good jobs their whole lives and don't even need assistance to child care, society would benefit.

We spend far too much on former taxpayers instead of fostering and forming new taxpayers.

I think your point is correct about the lack of optionality for women being in the workforce, but there are entire regions of the United States where it absolutely is optional. I live in one of them (Lynchburg, VA, which is filled with young evangelical Christian families that live in apartments and the mother stays at home) and my coworkers live in another (Salt Lake City, Utah which also has a ton of young moms staying at home).

I'm not foolish enough to think it's remotely possible in all places, but I do think an element of this is humans in the 21st century demanding a standard of living that far exceeds what they wanted in the 1970s, especially when it comes to vacations, automobiles, houses, etc.

My wife and I raised my first son (born when i was 23) in a 1 bedroom apartment, and my second child was born right after we moved into a 2 bedroom apartment. Most of my colleagues were shocked that I "didn't have a REAL HOUSE TO RAISE THE KIDS IN!!!! GASP!!!". And I realized then that many Americans have utterly warped ideas about the level of assets you need to have to enable family formation.

I totally agree, and my argument with the original post was that the author made it sound so simple.

Has any society successfully done this yet?

Basically, the only prosperous first world groups I see with fertility rates above replacement rate are religious subcultures (like the Mormons, Evangelicals, and Modern Orthodox Jews in the US). I simply don't see any other examples of being able to pull this off.

We are unhappy BECAUSE it's a utopia, and our brains evolved in a landscape that was ALWAYS trying to kill us. Like an immune system in an overly clean environment starts attacking inert things and creates allergies, our minds have created threats and focused on "relative" scarcity over actual scarcity. Instead of "How am I going to get enough calories to survive this week?" it's "Why does that guy get to be in a private jet and I have to fly coach?"

My wife worked in several daycares in her early 20s, including an extremely expensive "Bright Horizons" location in a very affluent area. Even premium daycares provide inferior care to infants and young toddlers versus parental/family care. The economics of a business being in charge of your child demand this. Something that shocked her was at this super expensive daycare she worked at, the infants were basically given the bare minimum of attention while the older children consumed all of the time from the staff. The focus was on parental retention, so her job was to focus on changing the diapers of the infants to prevent diaper rash, and this took precedence over actually holding them and interacting with them. At no point is it remotely similar to how homo sapien mothers parent their OWN infants.

Daycare is to parenting as processed food is to nutrition. They are modern developments that prioritize economics over quality.

A study done in Canada (a "natural experiment", where a lottery determined eligibility for free daycare and allocated it at random) allowed researchers to track children who were enrolled in daycare versus children who were parented by their mothers, found that (adjusted for income) the infants who lost out on the lottery and were raised by their mothers in early childhood were healthier and better adjusted adults years later.

"Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them."

Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?

Nobody had to meet this bar you set before. Let's just be honest here. There were three recent developments, all of which were, by themselves, good things. But those three things, combined, created an unprecedented phenomenon.

The 3 things:

1.) The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy. 2.) Women being granted autonomy and being allowed to join the workforce and leave marriages without suffering economic and social destruction 3.) Social support programs to create a poverty safety net funded by taxpayers instead of charity

No society on the planet ever had these things until the mid to late 20th century. And these things all contribute to radically reduced birth rates, in every single society that has implemented them together.

This take of "all you have to do is make the society encourage family formation" makes it sound like the three developments I listed are irrelevant, and that humans always just had this explicit menu of options that made family formation an optional pursuit, independent of a good life. That is simply not the case.

We need to be honest with ourselves about the uncharted territory we're in. It's not simple. Modern humans live in what would have been historically viewed as a Utopia. Our ancestors 5 generations back would have viewed our "jobs" as fake. They wouldn't even recognize what we do on a daily basis to earn food and shelter as labor of any kind. We have entire metropolises filled with people with soft hands who have literally never had to participate in their own survival from the perspective of harvesting food or cooking/heating fuel. Your comment just reeks of someone who is disconnected from the historical realities of 99.99999% of the humans who have ever lived.

Brown University has 1 administrator for every 2 students.

This is a widely known and discussed phenomenon and is actually a running joke here in the comments.

Honestly, I'm shocked that you're unaware of this, to a degree where you're calling my comment out. I don't know what your news sources are, but they're not keeping you informed.

I recently moved to a rural home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

I socialize with a bunch of current and former college professors, and they've all remarked on this phenomenon for nearby UVA and Virginia Tech. Interestingly, the one university in the area that is not impacted is the Christian fundamentalist Liberty University. The demographic that attends that school come from a high birth rate subculture. BYU is also not having an issue.

In fact, Liberty has had to expand. I'm not a fan of religious education, but I also think that ALL university tuitions are vastly overpriced to fund the absurdly overpaid and bloated armies of administrators. This includes my alma mater Virginia Tech.

I witnessed massive fraud first hand in the DoD and the VA (the area this gumroad guy was dealing with) as a Booz Allen contractor.

I worked directly with fraudulent shell 8a firms (literally a big white dude made his Filipino American wife the CEO of like 6 people and then subcontracted to my team with a direct award minority woman owned business contract valued at a $100m).

I witnessed massive waste by VA employees at the joint MHS/VA hospital in North Chicago, IL (they sandbagged an expensive IT modernization that was trying to reduce wait times because it was going to put a bunch of local VA sys admins out of work by shifting to a gov cloud data center).

You don't know what your talking about. You don't have first hand knowledge. Nobody on the ground for years in the Federal sector agrees with you or the gumroad guy. They agree with me.

My twin brother worked at a "Native Owned" defense contractor in Arlington, and literally never saw a Native American in their office a single time. There were employees with Washington Redskins merch everywhere and nobody cared because they KNEW that the single tribe that collected the checks at the top was never going to see the office. They just subbed out work to the big consulting firms anyway.

I have endless examples from working in the beltway for 10 years. Sorry that reality doesn't line up with your political tribal beliefs.

Nonsense?

Yeah, you're right, the US Federal government is a peak engine of efficiency and it's nonsense to think massive sums of money are wasted.

You're labeling someone a "Nazi nut job" over nothing.

It's juvenile and silly and screams "midwit overly absorbed into political news."

Enjoy your unearned moral superiority. It's a thin blanket against the cold wind of mediocrity, but you do you.

You mean the Gazan civilians living in a densely populated area governed by a group of insane 9th century theocrats who launched a war they knew they couldn't win militarily with the objective of using their own citizens as human shields?

Yeah, they should be remembered, and Hamas should be remembered for refusing to surrender the hostages and letting them get slaughtered while they hid in their tunnels.

Wrong.

Hasn't changed the behavior of a single developer on my team.

So Trump wants to help Putin while simultaneously seizing his oil tankers?

Explain.

These days it's a whole lot of Rust.

The numbers are interesting when you run them.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6920afb3-5f84-8008-827d-907e5f0a0a...

What falsehoods do I believe, exactly?

And thank you for the condescending, pious, moral superiority in the "your views" comment. It perfectly encapsulates the quasi-religious nature of the DEI adherents.

It's funny how the quest for "unique strengths" entirely ignores people with pale skin who grew up in trailer parks in Appalachia or farms in the midwest, despite the fact that they are dramatically underrepresented in our industry and in elite universities.

The DEI policies favor people with dark skin (as long as they're not Asian) and 1250 SATs from wealthy suburbs over pale skin 1450 SATs from rural backwaters. It's discrimination, it's "diversity" only on the surface. Incredibly shallow, condescending, and dehumanizing. It's so shallow that in most of the places it's implemented, it doesn't differentiate between descendants of slaves and recent West African immigrants, some of whom are wealthy descendants of the elites who captured and sold slaves in ports like Lagos.

And before you call me a bigot: My kids are "bi-racial", so if you think i'm a nazi, ask yourself why I hate my wife and kids.

The "poison pill" terms are not at all a new thing. They have existed for a long time, and were one of the main drivers of the highly aggressive "guilty until proven innocent" cancel culture within academia, where a PhD gets accused non-credibly, is blackballed from NSF funding, exiled from academia, and years later it's discovered they were innocent of the charges.

The length and breadth of this outage has caused me to lose so much faith in AWS. I knew from colleagues who used to work there how understaffed and inefficient the team is due to bad management, but this just really concerns me.

The CCP literally revoked the visas of key DeepSeek engineers.

That's all we need to know.

Feminist activists funded my mother's legal bills to win custody of me and my 4 siblings when she and my father divorced. My mother was a bipolar drug addict and the activists ignored this, and within a year social services gave us back to my father after neighbors called the police when my older sisters asked them for food. The police found me and my twin brother inside, abandoned in a crib, my mother nowhere to be found.

We suffered a year of neglect and abuse because of biased custody laws pushed by feminist activists, who project the traits of the worst men onto all of men, and pretend all women are angelic. I deeply resent it, and the "critics" in this article are doing the same thing.

Exactly this.

The reporters are extra aggressive when it involves companies with right of center founders or VCs involved. Both of these companies fit that profile.

Can you provide a link to data for the body counts you are describing?

He was shot with a bolt action .30-06 hunting rifle. There has never been a proposed ban on these weapons. Your comment is essentially saying he deserved it, and that you see some form of cosmic justice here.

Meanwhile, I've been reminded by your comment that people like you will celebrate the deaths of people they disagree with politically, which makes me less likely to support gun control. With neighbors like you, I'm going to hang onto them. The irony of people like you is your perceived moral superiority warps you into being a bad person.

Most of the world engages routinely in tribal thinking without any form of self-reflection. Northern Europe is a distinct exception due to post-enlightenment and post WW2 cultural norms.

The commenters in this thread engaging in transactional tribalism are angry at Trump supporters in the US (and therefore, all Americans because of their tribal "us vs them" lens) for engaging in the same transactional tribalism that they live in. From a game theory perspective, they want the US and northern Europeans to continue to be the good person in the Prisoner's Dilemma game while they reap the rewards.

As I've said elsewhere in this thread, the comments here actually support the beliefs of Trump's base, which is "the world hates us, only pretends to be nice to us when we help make them rich, and power is the only currency that matters."

There are people in this thread complaining about tariffs on imports in the US that are a fraction of what their own nations charge on imports. They don't seem to grasp that "fairness" is an emotional construct that matters for human voting.

"less than 3x is hardly vastly more"

Listen to yourself. That is absolutely ridiculous. This is not a serious conversation. I won't be replying to anymore of your comments.

None of you are responding to the fact that China and India are buying Russian oil and financing the thousands of dead every week.

Per capita means nothing to the planet. The temperature climbs regardless, and China has a choice and it's chosen power plants even if India doesn't. They are building coal plants every single day and you don't say anything because you are a product of a left-wing movement that views state capitalism as an offshoot of communism and therefore positive. That's why your movement never has anything critical to say about China. You only care about Muslims if they are being murdered by capitalists. But the uyghurs can just go pound sand. They are literally having forced birth control and have lower birth rates than any Muslim population on the planet and you sit there and ignore it.

Ironically, you are responding to a person who has the attitudes that his supporters believe the entire world has: They don't like Americans unless they are engaging in unequal trade where they sell goods at vastly lower tariff rates than they apply to US imports.

They have no problem with China destroying their fisheries, and joining with India to buy tons of Russian oil and finance the destruction of Ukraine, while simultaneously emitting vastly more CO2 than the US does.

They just want free defense, one sided "free trade" and the minute they stop getting it, they hate everyone in this country.

I don't agree with this attitude, but the commenter absolutely embodies it. This whole thread embodies it. It's the kind of thing I would send to a bunch of swing voters to persuade them to continue to support these policies.

Can you explain the difference between taxing the corporation itself vs taxing the executives, board members, investors, and employees directly (something that already happens)?