Warum auch nicht: auch als nicht wirklich religiöser Mensch sehe durchaus sinnvolle Ideen im Katholizismus oder allgemein Christentum. Ich sehe natürlich auch nicht so sinnvolle Dinge. Und ich sehe einen spirituellen Überbau, den ich so nicht teile. Aber das schließt die sinnvollen Ideen nicht aus. Warum auch.

Man, don’t get too hung up on the last sentence, that is more my personal opinion on how one should approach life, I don’t expect anyone to share it, I haven’t discovered the ultimate truth. Yet. So, my clearly marked personal opinion:

Don’t get me wrong, I hate helicopter parenting as much as anyone. “Back in my days”, we’d fuck off into the woods after school, doing all kinds of bullshit, and as long as we were home at dinner time and didn’t lose any teeth, all was fine. On the other hand, I can’t say that that stopped me from becoming a weirdo. I have seen plenty of people have kids who wanted them and really should not have kids, and I have seen some people go above and beyond for their children, although they were in bad situations, or got them by accident and so on.

If one gets a kid out of boredom, I would argue one is exactly the kind of person who parks their kids on youtube in order to watch their own tiktok slop in peace. Or the kind of person who gets a pet and then neglects it. Only that tying up a kid at the highway truck stop is, much to my surprise, still illegal.

Now, to the facts: the data looks pretty clear to me. Higher standard of living, more education, less kids. I don’t know why this is really seen as such a bad thing, since apparently, not all people have the inherent drive to have kids, and in a more “developed” society, there is no hard push that one has to have children or else. Not pushing people who don’t want to do something is good, in my not very humble opinion.

I mean, you could say that for a lot of reasons:

People in developed countries, with access to American-style Pizza = no kids, prove me wrong

If we look at birth rates of developed, industrialized nations, we see the same picture everywhere: a steady downwards trend, with the big chunk happening between the 60s and 90s, so basically, when quality of live became decent and the economy recovered in those countries, post-WW2.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?+title=Fertility_statistics https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/birth-rate https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/births-australia/latest-release

Counter-point: Zimbabwe is a country with very high mobile phone usage, and really high birth rates. I have no idea about trustworthyness of Zimbabwe sites, but they all seem to agree: https://technomag.co.zw/zimbabwes-mobile-penetration-passes-100/ https://www.zimbabwesituation.com/news/zim-mobile-phone-usage-climbs-up/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Zimbabwe

However, what is super interesting is the Wikipedia article above: Both births and total fertility go down with child mortality. The obvious conclusion is, if less of your kids die, you don’t need to birth so many kids, and interestingly, the less kids you seem to need overall.

So, based on this alone, I believe “high quality of life in strong economy” is much stronger correlated with decreasing birth rates than the invention of the iPhone. I would argue that it is more a case of one not needing that many kids to survive due to improved social and economic situation, and maybe access to education (including sex education of course, less accidents, more family planning).

Sure, entertainment is probably contributing a bit, but I don’t see it that far up the list.

Personally, I believe that if you have kids out of boredom, maybe you shouldn’t have kids, but idk, get a gym membership or something. How can we say that gifting someone a dog for christmas that may or may not be mistreated and discarded when the novelty weary of is bad, but kids out of boredom is ok?

Anyone saying they’re not having kids because of climate change or anything like this is just making excuses for the fact they’d rather not be taking care of a kid when they could be doing something fun or entertaining

Sounds like you asked all of “them”. Me included. Or at least a representative sample size, in which case I’d be interested in your methods and the statistics.

Ik hoor stroopwafels?!

Yeah, right? With current energy prices, price of decent coffee and so on, that coffee is at least 70 ct.

Doof nur, wenn es die Sorte ist, die gerne Holz isst.

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Rechts dann die restlichen 500000

At the end of the day, nothing is really beyond any doubt. Witnesses can imagine things, cops can be bribed, judges can have a newborn kid and maybe slept 3h last night

Absolutely. We are on a 3-10 year delay, but we get the same bullshit. Remember when QAnon made its way over?

As a fellow European, I wish I didn’t have to know who MTG is, but sadly I do. I also wish that I never heard of HCQ, homeopathy, and the relations between Semitic religions and space-based laser weapons, but here we are

That is the main purpose behind modern neoliberal turbocapitalist bullshit, yes. Explicitly designed to concentrate wealth.

The intended purpose of market economy is to optimise production. It’s a shame that it works only in very limited circumstances with heavy regulation, and only for as long as the ones participating in the market do not influence the regulation.

What the fuck, the 300€ chinese off-brand no-name washing machine I bought has been doing its thing for three years and counting now (with the occasional ripped t-shirt or disappeared sock). The only maintenance I have ever done is clean the “filter” (just a small hole somewhere where stuff accumulates) and throw in some machine cleaner it starts smelling. Fair, it does not dry and therefore is mostly an empty box with some pipes and an electric motor, but as someone else said, “electricity costs money, the sun is free”.

Devices are quite hard to track. Delete cookies, maybe create a new browser profile or use another browser and you’re another “device” in their eyes. IP addresses are imperfect as well, because often many people share one IP (families, companies, universities…). And behavior patterns are always a bit fuzzy.

But what is the purpose of the market? Some arcane, abstract, paperclip-machine-esque efficiency?

Or rather a short-term optimizer for labour and investments to get people to produce goods and provide services that are in demand and thus keep the lights on and society running?

Because in the latter case, someone providing me with nice chocolate cookies is a feature, not a bug. The system is (somewhat) working, the market is providing me chocolate cookies with reasonable efficiency [1].

[1]: plus some rainforest destruction, but that’s another issue that I personally don’t believe market economy or, more specifically, capitalism is capable of solving, but this is getting off topic

I know they like to be picky, to separate the “lifestyle hipsters” from the people who really want to become a monk/nun, after all, it is shared living with a lot of other people, so it makes sense to pre-screen a bit harder than your average student dorm. Plus, it is (meant to be) a (mostly) lifetime decision, so them making it hard is probably seen as a favour to weed out the ones that really should not do it.

But other than time, dedication, and maybe no felony record for setting churches on fire, I don’t think it is really meant to be “difficult” as in “we only take the best”.

I believe we could solve all problems with homosexual intercourse. US-Iran war? Gay sex. Russian-Ukraine war? Gay sex. People not getting laid? You won’t believe it…

The last thing I heard about Biontech is that the couple founding the company got crazy rich, figured out they don’t like being CEOs of a large company, and founded another small research lab with their money.

Besides, it is a private company, sure, they got government grants and funding especially during Corona, but I don’t think we should give random companies fucktons of tax money in normal circumstances. At least not while we’re doing the whole market economy capitalism thing.

That does not mean that science funding isn’t getting cut, I am still a bit salty that it removed my chances of getting a phd. Fighter jets and tanks aren’t free, and neither is pissing billions into the wind because you refuse to persecute fraudsters.

How is work in the court system these days?