jseban

People can just have higher salaries and save for themselves for their pension, just like any other expense they have in life.

There is no practical need for this to be centrally managed, other than you can't trust people to be responsible and plan for the future.

People already manage a big part of the pension savings by themselves.

I don't understand this, this is the way every hierarchy work, and how every single job/management role is functioning. It's to solve the problem of communication overhead growing exponentially with larger groups of people. Why does this make you sad? And is it better to have a dysfunctional organisation where people float in and out of poorly defined roles and everyone tries to do everything? Does that really make you more happy? I don't get this emotional take on specialisation.

> The hard part is coordinating, defining the problem, planning for the future, and communicating the current status of the problem.

Yeah the hard part about software engineering is being the henchman of your corrupt manager.

You can still be monogamous if some women have more children, not every woman needs to have 2 children to achieve that average. A woman can easily have 4 children and suddenly half of the women can also be childless and still achieve a 2 children average.

The whole idea that child bearing should be perfectly and equally distributed across the whole population is a construct of the social welfare state, enabled by subsidies, and is just an artificial form of equality like any other. As such I think it should be examined and debated like everything else, and not taken for granted as self-evident or "natural".

Yeah this is what I'm wondering too, seems like this is the obvious part of the deal that was somehow missed?

It makes perfect sense, and it would also be fair and benefit both single/childless people as well as people with children.

> How does women entering the work force (from your previous post) equal less freedom? Less freedom for whom? Certainly not women.

Less freedom for those who happen to like traditional gender roles, now they are forced to work more and adapt to more "modern" gender roles. Otherwise they will lose out massively because the single earner has so much lower salary now.

Less freedom because an almost doubled amount of total working hours for a family. Free time = freedom.

Less freedom for childless people because they have much lower salaries now because of the larger supply of workforce (which is somewhat compensated by subsidies to people with children). Now they compete against couples with double income on everything on the market.

A single childless person would previously have the same buying power as a single breadwinner, now they have half.

Less freedom because this creates a much higher pressure and financial incentives for people to have children and to have modern gender roles, and anything else is discouraged.

> if women can only work as unpaid housewives, they have no freedom.

Well, are you more free if you trade free time for working hours? You are literally only more free to slave more.

This freedom only manifests in the case when you want/need to leave your husband.

Sure it's going to work out for some people, but I still think the obvious downside of increased working hours in total is very significant and almost never mentioned. If you raise the working day from 8 to 12 hours, just because you find some guy who likes it, maybe doesn't mean it should be accepted as a perfect idea with no downside.

The issue that I'm having with this, is that child care is still relatively unqualified work, so how can it ever be highly compensated?

Parents who are highly educated doctors, pilots etc argue that they should be able to stay at home for 1-2 years with almost full salary, which the tax payers should subsidise, and at the same time they also pay an uneducated 16 year old 10 bucks an hour to babysit when they go to the movies?

And you have 1 educated child care professional easily caring for 10 small children, and making a very modest salary.

It doesn't really add up.

> Men aren’t the limiting resource here

Yeah that's the point, so there really is no need for every man to have children, should it be the norm I'm wondering. Can we get rid of this natural selection, and should we? I don't know. Why is it so self-evident that every person should have children? Clearly it's not natural. It's just another artificial "equality" of a social welfare state.

> Better medical treatments and lack of wars are not child subsidies.

Lower education and religion is probably the biggest cause for these higher birth rates. In the victorian era, people would simply not get married if they didn't have the means to raise children, and they would be childless, and there was nothing strange about that. To give subsidies for everyone to have children comes from the post ww2 politics.

> It can be very isolating when your childless friends can drop whatever they are doing to go have a good time

Yeah parents can't have as much spontaneous fun, but they don't have to deal with unhealthy loneliness of being alone on thanksgiving, christmas, vacations etc. Society is organised for the family unit, and there are no options for single people.

No but some men would have more than two children, and some men would have zero.

We balanced this out up until recently by sending men to war and other dangerous jobs that made them die before they had a chance to reproduce.

There is an enormous asymmetry between the sexes in our biology and that's the feature that drives natural selection and evolution.

The only reason why all people are able to reproduce are subsidies, otherwise natural selection would reject a lot.

Totally depends on the state of society and what the needs are, China had the opposite policy for over 30 years to achieve a declining birth rate. It's not true that more children = better. It's only an issue somehow for pyramid schemes of the welfare system.

> Huh? It has to work out that or the human race dies out. I guess you could have a few couples who have a lot of kids instead, but developed societies are really adverse to that.

Obviously the human race somehow made it until we created developed societies. I think you are confusing survival of the human race with survival of our current pension system.

Who knows if it's really better or worse to suddenly allow everyone to reproduce?

For sure it's not "natural", and as far as I can see it would actually reverse evolution to regression instead.

And it seems like we can't really stop it anyway with how many men today are becoming outsiders in society because they get rejected to reproduce.

Yeah, I'm constantly surprised that nobody every says this. With women entering the work force, now the family as a whole needs to work almost twice as much, as before when women were house wives. That's a pretty hefty price to pay for everyone, to save those women who were unlucky to have a cruel or unfair husband. I don't know if it's possible to say if it's "worth it" or not, but this independence sure does not come for free.

> Most would consider the implications of that to be highly immoral.

I think it's already immoral how society punishes people for being childless when it's a natural thing and can be 100% caused by characteristics that you are born with and have no control over.

> The majority of humans are going to be parents.

Only because of the subsidies. It's hardly "natural" for all humans to reproduce.

All living humans come from a long unbroken chain of natural selection and rejection of bad genes and reproduction of only the fittest to enable adaption to a changing environment.

If you create subsidies so that every human can reproduce, you are going to reverse natural selection and create survival of the unfittest where every bad gene will reproduce endlessly.

Not having children is just as "natural" as having children, it all depends of how your particular set of characteristics do in the current environment and foreseeable future.

Yes, a team of professional composers who call themselves "producers" who will "make suggestions" for how to change your songs from having potential, to being actually high quality music.

Sure, but then the reputation should be "German stability" and not efficiency.

> Feels like the whole "German efficiency" trope is mostly a meme

Yeah it's really false, Germany is painfully bureaucratic, ceremonial and slow and dysfunctional, compared to other leading western nations.

German engineering, and german manufacturing, are really what deserves to have good reputation.

> I've started doing it recently and it is lovely - no need for a bundler/compile step.

Same here, I'm also doing on-demand module loading, it's an enormous productivity boost for me as a developer because of the shorter feedback loop, zero time spent fighting/configuring the tool chain, and how powerful the debugger in the browser is when it actually works. It's also a massive performance boost for the resulting web page because of orders of magnitude less code, and small entry point/initial page load.

> Vanilla JS is IMHO a very nice and expressive language

I agree, and the runtime and browser is also a very nice framework for gui programming.

If people would just admit, and adapt to, the fact that the browser won over native, and Oracle won over Sun, we would avoid this situation with armies of Java developers making rube goldberg variations of basic relational, sysadmin, and gui programming tasks. But then again, how would we employ all the people with these extreme productivity multipliers, as long as our politics and economic system is still pretending that we just had the industrial revolution, and need to man the assembly lines, then Parkinson's law will apply for tech work just like everything else.

You can just use a service to take care of the estate, you are not obliged to do that at all.

Yeah I think this war on consumerism and boomer lifestyle is a bit exaggerated, and I mean, if you take away all the benefits and rewards you have to take away some of the demands too. I can recycle and share and rent and downsize if I can also downsize my working hours accordingly. A bit weird that the middle class now wants to get rid of the carrot and just have a bigger stick, that doesn't really add up for me.

It also requires exponentially more stuff to be active year around, and adapting to a full time work/weekend schedule, compared to temporarily with a flexible schedule.

Just the beach walk will require a whole wardrobe of suitable clothes and shoes if you want to do it year around and live in a place with seasons. The scooter doesn't work in the winter.

Renting things also requires you to have a flexible schedule and be outside of the normal work week/weekend, because on a sunday when the weather is nice, everyone wants the stand-up paddle board and all the other stuff at the same time, that's the whole point of owning stuff, that it's there for you when you want it. Renting always means you get it when (most) other people don't want it.

If you are always travelling then yeah, I guess it makes sense. The problem I have with minimalism is that it also minimises the activities you can do. Any sport and hobby requires stuff, the more stuff you have, the more activities you can do.

Painting, playing music, going swimming, skateboarding, playing tennis, running, picnic/barbecue, hiking etc etc.

If you don't have any stuff, you can't be active. I just get bored to death when the only thing I do in my free time, is looking at things and eating/drinking.

I don't see what the big deal is to be honest, just a harmless hobby to collect random trinkets, it gives people joy, and you can just get rid of it when they die. I don't see what the harm is

You're the one who's using the straw man here to argue about why team work itself sucks and bring up that some people can't speak english.

The assumption is that you have a proactive team work environment, for example scrum, which is how the vast majority of all programmer jobs are, and that the people involved can all speak fluently in a common language.

> There are entire cultures which function this way. Even in the Anglosphere, the far majority of people won't talk about most their issues until designated times and prompted by bosses.

Yeah, for example the military and factory work. But not team work environment, it does not function this way.