magnax1
3yr ago
Religiosity doesn't seem to have much correlation in general. There are exceptions (mormons, like you said, but even they are trending down fast) and the most religious countries in the world, the Arab peninsula states, have low birth rates that are trending down fast.
magnax1
3yr ago
I cannot express just how confident I am that the price of a square foot of housing in the United States is not an important driver of low fertility rates
You are absolutely wrong. Population density and it's associated costs are maybe the biggest difference in variation between tfr of developed countries.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1693032/
This is why France, Russia, and the US have had relatively higher birth rates than other developed countries--they all still have quite a bit of low cost free space. On the other end of the spectrum, extremely densely populated over urbanized countries with high cost per square foot of property in east asia, such as Korea, China, and Japan, are on the opposite end of the spectrum.
You can easily see this within the US as well. Places like NYC have abnormally low birth rates, especially among native populations.
magnax1
3yr ago
It seems to me that people associate and conflate nimbyism with multiple different issues. It's understandable, maybe even beneficial, that people might oppose things like housing projects in areas with lots of families. One could argue those things need to go somewhere, but I think ultimately housing projects in modern urban america have been failures. Its time to try something else.
Then there's the more common somewhat related problem of regulatory burden, where people oppose construction of basic housing, apartments, businesses, or infrastructure, through arcane laws that basically upend the function of property rights (I can do with my property as I will). This seems less defensable and ultimately is one of the main cruxes of the housing crisis in high cost west coast cities.
Then there's this recent left leaning obsession with dense urban living that gets thrown in (without any logical connection IMO). The claim is that it's more environmentally friendly, would lead to more equitable or equal outcomes, and also just seems to be an aesthetic choice. The method to achieve this seems to be scrapping suburban infrastructure, regulating away cars, and generally centralizing government authority so people cannot resist. There are a lot of obvious reasons not to do this (dense urban areas have poorer outcomes than suburbs in income inequality, mental health, self reported happiness, crime and basically every metric you can think of outside of average income, which may or may not still exist when adjusted for cost of living) If it isn't obvious I think the value of this argument approaches nill, and is just signal boosted by the location and recruiting pool of media conglomerates. If anything, as the internet makes your location more and more economically irrelevant, it seems that dense urban living makes less sense than ever.
magnax1
3yr ago
I don't think this is as separated as you seem to think.
I don't think they're separate. Like I said-
the biggest fear of wokism in corporations comes from implicit regulatory burden
But civil rights suits and so on are not the biggest burden. It's one of many burdens, and the burdens become bigger and more arbitrary the bigger the company.
magnax1
3yr ago
I think you're misreading companies' regulatory burden for fear of wokism. Google et al are holding back for the former, which is much more central to its daily life. In fact, the biggest fear of wokism in corporations comes from implicit regulatory burden via law suits supported by old civil rights law.
Google saw that openAI got away with releasing tech without the feds slamming down arbitrary regulation (so far) and were like "okay, maybe it's safe." This is all at best tangentially related to wokism. Never forget that the federal government's regulatory apparatus is the #1 concern of any large corporation.
magnax1
3yr ago
No, I'm just saying some of what chatgpt puts out is pretty much garbalygook. "What's the joke?' is a question without an answer.
Yes. The deep south cash crop states were not the only slave states. You pointed out border states yourself, many of which are quite temperate in climate. There was no reason for them to be so undeveloped compared to new england, and even some of the relatively underpopulated great lakes states. Virginia is actually an ideal place for industrialization--lots of cheap coal, lots of riverways that can transport coal and then power industry in cities, and lots of amazing places for huge ports. Yet, Virginia never really industrialized.
Studies have actually been done, although the veracity will always be fuzzy with 150+ year old data, they never suggest the effects are "not very" large.
A lot of borders are arbitrary, but the outcomes are not. The policy of a state and culture of a region are maybe the most important single factor for economic development. Slave states vs non slave are maybe the best example outside of east and west germany.
magnax1
3yr ago
There is no good economic argument that slavery was an integral part of the north's development, or the south's in terms of opportunity cost. You can clearly see the impact of slavery as an institution was highly negative just by comparing outcomes across borders of states with and without slavery. Slavery's incentives were totally counterproductive to long term economic growth. It shouldn't take a genius to see why--it's not worth it to build up skilled labor, either slave or non slave, with slavery dominating the labor market. It's not too dissimilar to the resource curse where you're incentivized to dig money out of the ground instead of build up long term economic prospects like education and infrastructure. It might be worse because even on an individual level people have little reason to better themselves whereas resource curses mostly suck up expensive corporate and state level capital.
magnax1
3yr ago
I'm not surprised race obsessed americans draw spurious connections on racial grounds, but like I said, it says more about them than Rowling.
It reminds me of this recent incident-
https://nypost.com/2022/11/25/lamar-odom-thinks-phoenix-suns-having-a-gorilla-mascot-is-racist/
Most people don't see a gorilla mascot and immediately leap to "That's a racist caricature!" Because that's just not normal. Likewise for banker goblins and jews.
magnax1
3yr ago
I think that some people saw greedy bankers im a fantasy world and immediately went "Wow! Those are jews! How dare she!" Says more about them than anything else. There is just so little connection that it doesn't deserve a counterargument.
magnax1
3yr ago
You may be right that rational is not the right word (I actually kind of hate that word, I just wasn't being precise enough I guess) but projection and the general meaning of the statement as a whole should be pretty obvious--they are projecting their worldview and values onto other countries, that America and co have the same zero sum authoritarian worldview and that will lead them to conflict with russia, when it's obvious by their different actions (How NATO plays out vs historic Russian alliances) that this isn't the case. They then use this claimed worldview to justify things they were going to do anyways (invade a third party). I think it's totally fair to call this irrational, in that it's just not an argument that stands up to any scrutiny, but it is also has a clear purpose and the term rational is too wishy washy relativistic to be meaningful.
magnax1
3yr ago
Fantasy and reality often have a sheer chasm between them. There definitely is some truth to the fact that some girls enjoy some level of non-consensual encounters, but there is also a wide range from "I said no, but if he ignores that it gives me cover to not feel bad about cheating" to "Some random stranger held a gun to my head and forced me to blow him."
I don't think many, even those who have non-consensual fantasies, would enjoy the latter.
magnax1
3yr ago
IIRC work is now the most common place to meet a spouse, and if not, its ones of the most likely. Of course workplace romances can end poorly, because most romances do. I don't think that's a good argument against them. I have had some regrettable workplace romances. One was so nasty that I was credibly threatened by the woman, among other things. On the other hand, I don't think there are many other good places left in the modern world to find a spouse that are widely accessible.
As for the business, it probably isn't worth it in an abstract sense, but what people forget is that companies are just groups of people, and people want to get laid. HR can't really fight human nature and they're never going to fire top people over getting laid. If you suck at your job? Yeah, they might use it as an excuse.
magnax1
3yr ago
I think we just have fundamentally different moral values. I don't think it's that big of a deal for some woman to have to turn down a weirdo multiple times. To me, that just seems like part of life. I don't think its nice for some weirdo to keep asking, but there's a huge gap between not nice and meaningfully wrong. There is no damage caused here, at least on the individual level. If we want to talk on a societal level, that's a lot more foggy, especially because currently there is no presiding sexual morality to speak.
Just because someone is a degenerate weirdo in silicon valley doesn't mean that dating norms, or the stated (but entirely ignored) norms set out by HR departments and oversocialized libs are valid either. Nor is being a silicon valley degenerate weirdo particularly a big deal. People don't have a right to social comfort beyond the option of just getting up to leave. This is a case of hysterics in the face of someone who is maybe slightly out of line.
And the point was that the threshold for discomfort can be lower. Again, a person doesn't have a right to total social comfort. The moral question of polygamy is a whole other thing which really isn't done justice by any leftist lenses.
magnax1
3yr ago
I'm not a turbo autist, and to prove it, I won't brag about my sexual exploits on an internet forum.
I think if anything, only a turbo autist would think the line is clear, because they wouldn't have the experience to realize otherwise. You can often guess how a woman will react to a certain kind of advance, but you often can't as well. Also a non autist will also realize that making a women a little uncomfortable is also not the end of the world if you're otherwise passably social.
Of course, there are also just people who are too afraid to make explicit advances, but I don't think that's """autism""", but something else entirely.
magnax1
3yr ago
If their fear was that NATO would prevent them from invading their neighbors, they were quite right to be afraid. That just means that the fear is more projection than rational opposition.
magnax1
3yr ago
However I sometimes feel like the metoo movement and some parts of feminist groups want a completely asexual workplace
Their actions seem to align more with a group looking for a sexual dynamic that is totally dominated by the female sex than an asexual workplace. For example, it seems that their opposition here lies in the man benefiting from his status, not the sex in itself.
I think you could argue that this set of beliefs or values is espoused because men are more likely to benefit from workplace hierarchies and status in terms of sexual benefits. I also think to effectively argue that you would need to build up a very blank slate view of gender dynamics and values thereof that doesn't hold up to scrutiny because status games are an intrinsic part of male attractiveness (although I won't go into detail there simply because it would take a lot of time) This seems more and more like a deconstruction of that dynamic under nebulous claims of misogyny than any principled criticism of workplace dating dynamics.
magnax1
3yr ago
The line is far less distinct then you're letting on. What one person sees as too pushy is often times completely effective and other times will make a woman quite uncomfortable or even angry. It's difficult to know which is which until you try, and the threshold is actually far below the aforementioned case of trying to get some women to join what amounts to a harem.
magnax1
3yr ago
Public opinion has to have a direct effect
on voting to sway politicians. The American public will never vote for one guy over another because he wants to send 1/1000th less of the yearly budget to Ukraine.
magnax1
3yr ago
He was successful precisely because he's a new money/guido type not a blue blood type like Romney. He also was willing to say whatever benefited him most, contradicting his previous stated beliefs quite regularly.
magnax1
3yr ago
It's like work is not fun and workers are in a precarious position and must be on their toes.
I'm not speaking on this particular incident because I don't know enough details, but a lot of these people who get shoved out ceremoniously are in a precarious position for a reason totally unrelated to the incident--workplace feuds, poor performance, being a weirdo in a general undefined sense, etc. Then management or HR will take some arbitrary unsubstantiated claim and kick them out. This is pretty common in the mid and higher ranges of bureaucracies and probably makes up a lot of woke firings IMO.
If we accept that NIMBY policies lead to lower density, then sure. I don't think that's the case. Very few places have an incentive to build up and not out, but regulations increases costs for both.
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