OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
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User ID: 359
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10d ago
I live in a low population red-tribe town surrounded by farms and our elementary school and preschool are locked and no unauthorized adults are allowed in. If one tried to force their way in it would be treated seriously.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10d ago
It's like being a Christian and suddenly a street preacher video is blowing up online. The preacher's argumentation isn't sound and he's weirdly confrontational towards a handful of people just going about their day (and yeah, those people are sinners, but it's still confrontational.)
Wouldn't it be kind of frustrating for this to be the thing that takes off as proof of Christianity, and not all the actual scholarship? If I were to say I wasn't a fan, but I still was a Christian, would that be having and eating cake?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10d ago
If so, that's good. A lot of the people responding to the video are saying, "I'm going to go out right now and investigate my nearby publicly-subsidzied daycare today!" Which is just dumb.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10d ago
Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset is a good classic for women. Feminist for it's time, but still aligned with reality in a harsh Nordic way.
I'd love to recommend Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book but it's a harder sell.
Something by Graham Greene. Brighton Rock perhaps?
Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now.
Basically find something older than 50 years that appeals to their interests.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10d ago
Yes, massive fraud. No, this video isn't proof of it. This video is just outrage bait.
Was this filmed the day it was released? No, could have been filmed... December 25th? December 24th? It clearly wasn't filmed in the Summer. It's not like this was a culmination of years of investigation.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10d ago
I've been ignoring this for one huge reason: This video was posted on December 26th. If anyone approached my children's preschool today, they would find 0 children there. Not 0 people, because it's also a Lutheran church and there's always some kind of social happening somewhere. But 0 preschool-aged children. They're all home for winter break.
If a stranger tried to go to my child's preschool during a business day, they would not be let into any classroom. They can call the office or send an email to schedule a walkthough. But if you don't have the phone app for parents or an appointment, you're not getting through the double doors.
The fact that it's a 23 year old doing this "investigative journalism" makes my eyes roll so hard. He has no idea what "normal" would look like in the first place. I'm very tired of this genre of "Watch me make unreasonable demands of people and watch as they're weirdly defensive for no reason."
I'll admit the misspelled "learing center" was a nice touch . I'm not going to make the positive claim that these institutions are all above board and the victim of selective editing. There's enough journalism indicating that this kind of fraud is rampant. I'm just perpetually annoyed that this is what makes people pay attention and become outraged, when this sort of thing has been reported on for a while now across America:
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
11d ago
Hardcore History is fun and good production value.
I like Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World but you have to pick out the episodes that interest you.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
12d ago
You are unfortunately correct directionally, but you underestimate just how bad it can get in other places. We can remain "first" of a metric that craters globally for some time.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
13d ago
Honestly, I think the "We're number 1" mentality is integral to American's self-conception, but it doesn't necessarily need to be on wealth/power. We were happily number 1 in Liberty for a long while without any corresponding wealth, and that high will sustain us long after our global dominance ends.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
18d ago
Except women are also punished for not marrying in this scenario. Which would help a bit with pair bonding early on.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
19d ago
But the end goal isn't lower-priced houses, it's more children. If the only way to afford a single family home became to have 3+ children, more people would have them? Also, I don't think you're taking into account that people would still need to qualify for the mortgage, meaning the total house value can't be so high that the two parents can't afford it. This policy just takes out saving up for it which is onerous given that the mid 20s is the best biological time for babies.
Though my policy combined with something like:
- All houses with 4+ rooms and 0 residents under 18 for 5 consecutive years is subject to a 200% property tax increase.
Would help move the current housing stock around and help to some extent.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
20d ago
People who drink Starbucks don't really like coffee, they like Starbucks syrups.
It's more like: imagine someone who really likes Tomatoes. They grow different varietals from seeds and buy them from Farmer's markets and they eat them raw and sliced with a homemade light dressing. But they don't like tomato sauce.
I don't think it would be fair to tell such a person: "Actually most tomatoes are eaten in tomato sauce, if you don't like tomato sauce you don't really like tomatoes."
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
20d ago
Pslams are great for the drama, which can really come out with modern translations/settings:
Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain….
You will rule them with an iron scepter
You will dash them to pieces like Pottery
Therefore you kings be wise, be warned
You rulers of the Earth.
Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling!
Lord, I am weary with my groaning.
Lord, I drench my couch with tears.
I waste away from grief.
Or they'll devour my soul, like a lion
Tearing me to pieces while my screams ring out in vain!
For the wicked in their pride
Refuse to seek Him
All of their thoughts are,
"There is no God."
And his ways seem to prosper all the time
Your judgements are too high
They're out of his sight!
As if they were bread, they consume
They devour my people
They never call on the Lord
Too busy doing wrong
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
20d ago
Actually it looks like, in Hungary, the thing that improved TFR the most was housing subsidies:
https://hungary.representation.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-12/hetfa_fertilitymodels_20190913.pdf
Panel A indicates a significant positive effect of home ownership support in the third year. The parameter estimate indicates that a 1%point increase in home ownership support would lead to a 0.00047 (1.2% compared to baseline birth probability 3.87%, which is equivalent with 1099 additional births per year) increase in birth probability.
Here's a proposal:
Upon the birth of a third child to a married couple, the government gives them a down payment equal to 20% of the median US 4 bedroom single family home. They still have to qualify for a mortgage on their own and the money can only be used for this purpose. This applies even if the family owns a smaller sqft home
Pros:
-
Incentivizes marriage.
-
Incentivizes having kids young.
-
Incentives home building if there are more buyers? But only if obstacles to home building decrease.
Edit: Feel the need to elaborate on that last one since it's contrary to typical market wisdom. But it would be similar to the Government subsidizing college - lots of colleges popped up to support the increased demand. Prices also rose, which brings me to the Cons)
Cons:
- Inflates home prices, but the couple still has to have sufficient income to qualify for the monthly payment so hopefully not by that much.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
27d ago
I just don't understand the difference between going out and taking a boat or taking, say, a plane. Like, could we send special forces to an airport in Brazil and have them fly out with a dozen Boeing jets and it's not an act of theft or war? Something like that would be legal? Or do boats sit in a weird conceptual space?
I genuinely don't understand and am not intending to sound like I'm taking a side here. I'm not intentionally doing the noncentral fallacy. I just want to understand the difference between this and stealing the crown jewels.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
28d ago
Thank you, this is very helpful. Would you say that the difference between piracy and this is that piracy is when an unflagged or false-flagged ship attacks a ship sailing under the flag of a country. And this is a country attacking an unflagged/false-flagged ship? So actually the opposite.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
28d ago
Don't know if this belongs here or the culture war or small scale questions. But the US has sized a Venezuelan oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela. I would like to know what makes this different than piracy, if anything.
The US says it had a "seizure warrant" for it. What does that mean? Was the vessel subject to US laws at any point, violated them, and this is the result?
The US says that the tanker is sanctioned. What does this mean? Economic sanctions usually mean, "I won't do business with you," can a sanction mean, "I won't let you do business with someone else, and if you do I'll seize your vessel in your waters?" At what point is a sanction a war with fancier language?
"Guyana's maritime authority said Skipper was falsely flying the country's flag." Does this impact the legal calculation?
Outside of the numerous questions, I'm getting Iraq war vibes from this. "They support terrorism! They have weapons of mass intoxication! The people will thank us, the leader is a dictator, etc etc."
Will the US have boots on the ground in Venezuela in a year? It seems so contrary to Trump's MO, what is going on here?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
29d ago
They managed to keep out the riff raff with few strategies:
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0 parking. No street parking, no parking lots, you needed to park on your own driveway and walk to the parks.
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0 bathrooms. Kind of inconvenient when you have a potty-training child, but maybe a potty-training child is one of the riff raff they want to keep out.
-
0 public transportation routes nearby.
The three combined guaranteed that everyone at the parks was a neighbor.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
29d ago
Yes, I have a "Mud room" by the front door, with a bench and a place to hang coats and store shoes. Unfortunately, we almost always come into the house through the garage. The first floor is basically a high-use area. With four kids, food goes on the floor, people track dirt in from the backyard to the mudroom to the garage and back. It gets swept every day, mopped and vacuumed twice a week. I wouldn't eat off the floor (though my toddler does and hasn't gotten sick yet!).
No one wears shoes on the second floor.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
30d ago
I once lived in a neighborhood that had practically 0 yard-space but 5 different parks/playgrounds within a 5-10 minute walk. It still wasn't "city living" since the nearest grocery store was still a good distance away, but I would take that over the 1/4 acre typical American suburb.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
This is like that "Mandatory booster seats reduce the birth rate" study. A feature that saved the lives of 1:100 prevents the entrance into he middle-class of 10:100.
Don't get me wrong, it's better to be financially stressed than dead. But I am explaining why people's experiences of the economy is not matching up with the markers economists are paying attention to. If economists actually want to figure it out, they need to start here. What is the minimum basket of goods someone needs to buy in order to achieve a "middle class lifestyle" this decade and how many people in each generation can afford it today?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Yep, my parents were able to have three kids fit in a sedan, and when they bought an SUV it was a choice they made in their 40s because they had the extra cash for the luxury. Meanwhile, the second I got a positive pregnancy test for my third kid, my husband did his research and we traded in our two cars (we each had a car before we married) for a used minivan.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
But I see that Best Buy and Amazon have flat screen TVs (24") for $50.
This is interesting but kind of besides the point. The point is, Economists are able to say something like, "The cost of TVs has gone down from $5,000 to $300, offsetting the increase of the cost of quality cotton shirts increasing from $10 to $50 (quality meaning of the same threadcount/fabric weight as was common before the 2000s) and the increase of quality jeans from $40 to $130. And so the true cost of things has only increased slowly.
But in reality, people in the middle class in the 1990s bought the $10 shirts and $40 jeans and the $300 CRT and were happy enough, while people in the middle class in the 2020s still spend $300 on TV hardware but also buy jeans and t-shirts that fall apart after 20 wears and feel like it's all a sham.
The numbers that will reflect how people feel about the economy - the vibes - will be the minimum amount it takes to purchase a middle-class lifestyle. Middle class lifestyle is what bundle of goods they feel socially obligated to purchase as reflected to them by their parents, relatives, employers, and the TV. I don't think CPI really tracks this and so CPI isn't going to tell us much about vibes and whether people think they're struggling or not.
See my comment here: https://www.themotte.org/post/3430/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/395401?context=8#context
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