domain:betonit.substack.com
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6hr ago
Maybe there’s a problem with repatriation? I don’t actually know if countries have to accept criminals if they’re originally citizens.
The fertility problem continues to defy the desire to blame it on a political hobby horse. People try to draw correlation lines with feminism, secularism, diversity, urbanization, high cost of housing/education. To some extent, they succeed; those are all correlated with modernity. But look closely and you'll see outliers for your chosen culprit. Low fertility is hitting everyone regardless of regional particularities, just on a time lag of how deep they are in the boonies.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4hr ago
Maybe $2 million for some people, true. Most would be much less. According to FRED the median US personal income in 2022 was $40,480. According to the US census there are about 74M women between the ages of 15 and 50 (the age categories used for calculating TFR). Let's say we get half of them to have a child (that would boost US TFR to ~2.3). If we gave each of them the median income that comes out to about $1.5T per year. That would be about 15% of the US federal budget, 10% more than we spend on Social Security. This is much less than I expected it to be!
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
5hr ago
generates more economic value
Actually we can’t say this. At least not what it really denotes. Stressed working women raise less healthy, less intelligent children who are more likely to have behavioral problems. Stressed and older women and women who do not breastfeed correctly or nurture correctly are more likely to have children with autism. Intelligent working women give up on producing more offspring who are also intelligent, and the productivity gains from the very intelligent are outsized. Although there is not a study on this next one, it’s likely that stressed working women lead to unhappier, less healthy husbands, which cuts the productivity of all men, while also sapping their political participation due to household multitasking.
It would be far more economically valuable in toto and longterm if women focused on their biological role of mothers, wives, and homemakers. For the best of both worlds, restrict the lowest stress occupations to young women. And then if we really cared about wealth (what economic productivity ought to denote) we can ban makeup and so on. It’s truly dystopian to think that there are double doctor households where the male doctor is more stressed because he doesn’t have a homemaker to rely on, the female doctor (an intelligent woman who you want having lots of children) is delaying childbirth and then having only 1-2 less healthy and less intelligent children with a high rate of autism, and at the end of the day they are both unhappy despite being “economically productive”, and the naive economists think this is somehow a net gain for the country because their profession is narrow minded.
Ding ding.
There seems to be a situation where a corporate job is, dare I say, a substitute good for a committed husband. A woman getting a corporate job is given healthcare, a retirement account, oftentimes food and transport are subsidized, she gets a social life and maybe some travel attached to work, and is REWARDED for giving up her prime childbearing years to produce extra value for the shareholders. Many of the reasons women have 'settled down' with men in the past are satisfied by a decent job that provides baseline benefits as part of the package.
But a corporate job can't provide her with a kid. So while all the above 'benefits' are legible, the opportunity cost of NOT having a kid is not concrete until, say, 15 years down the line where she's got a career but she's still single and childless and her bio clock is punishing her for not reproducing.
Looking at it that way, males are in direct competition with megacorps to attract mates who will want to raise kids. They have to offer a 'better deal', which is to say they have to make enough money to provide shelter, healthcare, retirement, food, transport, etc. And if the female isn't explicitly incorporating 'bear and raise children' into her calculation then the corporate job looks like a solid choice.
So yes, WHY are women discounting the sacrifice of their childbearing years so heavily? Are they actually aware of the opportunity cost there?
TIRM
16hr ago
very low entropy walls of text
You mean high entropy as in terrible signal to noise ratio?
ares
3hr ago
When I was a young SWO on deployment to the Horn of Africa for anti-piracy operations, we regularly came upon skiffs in open waters with a dozen Somalis crammed on. We'd drive our big warship close, then our VBSS team would take a RHIB over to see what they were doing. They always had one or two fishing poles and a few rotten fish aboard, having jettisoned their weapons as soon as they saw our big warship approaching. "We're fishermen" they'd tell us through a translator, in open ocean on a 12-foot boat with 20 men onboard. Well, one day one group of Somalis decided that they were not going to jettison their weapons, and instead opened fire on one of the ships in our ARG. They launched at least one RPG and somehow completely missed the giant, boxy, unmoving ship that was right next to them. The VBSS team shot them until they surrendered. We zip tied the Somalis, brought them onboard, and gave them a fair bit of medical care (and not just for the holes we'd seen fit to add to a few of them). So now we had these Somalis onboard, locked in our medical spaces (because while the US Navy apparently takes inspiration from jails when designing their berthing, they don't actually make any of those rooms secure for holding criminals). This was back when the US didn't recognize Somalia as a country, so our State Department was having the darndest time figuring out what to do with these guys. We drove around for a week, maybe more, before a deal was brokered to give them to Yemen. They were dropped off and (according to the scuttlebutt) promptly executed.
This was almost 20 years ago, and I still think about it regularly. Should it have gone different, from the moment the Somalis surrendered? Would have been a lot cheaper and easier to have just shot them all there and sunk their skiff, with the same outcome. But that's morally wrong, and not in keeping with the rules of war. We shouldn't've given them to Somalia; they're not a real country (still aren't, IMO) and they government would most likely use the pirates' lives to extort bribes from whatever warlords or families they could, and then free or execute them (flip a coin). We shouldn't've put them into an American jail or Gitmo because they weren't worth it.
The conclusion I keep reaching is that the Somalis (and, to bring it back to the point at hand, immigrant criminals) are a time when "don't flip the switch in the trolley problem" is the best answer. We can know that the "justice" they'll face in their homeland (or Yemen) will probably be unjust, but it's not us doing it and that absolves us of some of the moral responsibility - enough to make it the least shitty of a bunch of shitty choices. We remove them from our control and return them to a place where a government will claim jurisdiction over them, and if that government doesn't afford all the legal protections that we do for our citizens, well... that's on their government. And I know there would be extreme cases when we shouldn't give them over to the other government, like shipping our Jews off to the Nazis or our Lienz Cossacks to the Soviets (oops). But those seem like the extreme cases. As a rule, I think "make the other country deal with their citizens" is the right answer. Our State Department has the power to make every country on Earth do that, assuming we have the political willpower. I worked closely with the State Department later in my career, and there is no doubt in my mind that they're capable of brokering that deal. If the US is ever told by another country that they won't take possession of their citizens who have committed crimes in the US, it is only because the US State Department has decided against spending the effort/money to convince the other country.
Ioper
4hr ago
I mean, were talking like 0.5-1 more kids per woman, it isn't that big a change. We've lived in that world and with the same FLPR.
Also, the state doesn't necessarily have to compensate people, it could punish them instead. Currently we only have (tiny) carrots but perhaps we should introduce some sticks as well and possibly increase the carrots for those that actually contribute until we reach something sustainable.
Or try any number of other ideas a Instead of throwing up our hands and declaring that we've tried nothing and are all out of ideas.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
Japan and Italy have very low female labor force participation rates. Israel has a high one.
pigeonburger
9hr ago
Family reunification in Canada requires that the sponsor vouches that they can financially support the sponsored immigrant and that they will not need to ask for social assistance for 3 years. They check that the sponsor is in good enough financial health to support them. If they do ask for social assistance, the government can ask the sponsor to reimburse it.
I mean, it's not perfect, but it's not like no one though of this problem.
Recursive_Enlightenment
11hr ago
One of my crazier ideas is that the US should pay the government of Singapore to run our health care system.
2rafa
17hr ago
How is it surprising? People in this kind of Eastern European state can look honestly at the situation and compare the extraordinary increase in prosperity that Poland, Hungary and they themselves have seen in the EU orbit with the continuing shitholes for ordinary people that Belarus, pre-war Ukraine and even Russia itself to some extent are. It’s unclear whether Russia is ever going to reach Western European income levels (seems unlikely), while it’s pretty much guaranteed that Poland will very soon. Obviously there are relevant additional factors, but average people don’t consider most of those. I wouldn’t want to join or stay in the Russian orbit.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
Except the actual regulations in question are often things like ‘allow duplexes and triplexes in single family zones’, which NEETS will not be living in except as a dependent, and they could easily live as dependents in single family homes as is the stereotype.
Few people want to build the Kowloon walled city.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
Greg Abbott has a propaganda push about trying to reduce housing prices. Someone immersed in Texas politics- or heavily into the YIMBY scene- would probably be aware of it.
In practice a lot of the actual programs he’d point to are populist signaling, but Austin is the only major city with declining apartment rents while the city grows.
This tweet from an economists caught my eye.
“One of the biggest gaps in economics is explaining why outcomes differ across countries.
Why is homeownership lower in Germany? Why do the rich live the center of the city in Argentina, but in the suburbs in America?
We don't have great frameworks to answer these Qs.“
https://twitter.com/arpitrage/status/1786042798275277144?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
Is this a question we really don’t know the answer to or a question that good people have learned to no consider the frameworks that are explanatory? I feel like the white nationalist and the woke can easily answer this question. One side will say racism and the other side will say diversity is not our strength and people fled from crime.
Wikipedia has the Great Migration occurring 1910-1970. And White Flight as occurring 1950’s-1960’s. Cities largely built before then have dense urban cores . Those cities built after are endless suburbs. Of course cars took off as a middle class thing around this time period too. Argentina might be a higher percent European ancestry than any country in the world.
How many other question have solutions to them that aren’t analyzed because the researcher starts with the wrong frame.
Explain your math I’m not following. Also would be reducing taxes by a lot.
If half of women had one child you would have a tfr of .5.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4hr ago
I mean, it's not that big of a change, like, numerically. I bet it would be a pretty big change in the lives of the women having the children. It's true the state could punish people but, being a liberal, I am pretty averse to that as a strategy.
SSCReader
10hr ago
That seems like a lot of side effects for something that doesn't happen that often.
Places with no cross walks? Places with no sidewalks so people have to walk on the road? Places where people have obstructed the sidewalk by parking on it? The fact people have to get out of cars onto the road when parking or when getting into their car?
Not to mention how it allows you to murder someone just by waiting nearby until they walk into the road to get into their car. Shoulda yielded to me! I was in a car, he wasn't! Sure he was about to get into a car, but he wasn't actually in one! Yeah I aimed for him, waited for him and accelerated to 80mph but so what?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
10hr ago
How does SG’s healthcare work?
If there’s ever a country I’d expect to have the dreaded “death panels”, it’d be this one, I guess.
Stellula
11hr ago
Maybe I’m using the term wrong? Low entropy as in: very little actual information. Something that could realistically be summarized in a sentence or two, gets expanded into a giant wall.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
12hr ago
An urban growth boundary, inside of which there is only high density development, outside of which no one may build at all.
I don't claim to want this at all. An urban growth boundary would be a terrible thing. Letting people build on farmland they own is no different to letting people build on urban land they own. You wouldn't get the Kowloon Walled city, you'd get a smooth gradient of housing densities slowly decreasing from urban centres to rural locations.
A lot of the UK's current housing problems stem from the fact that people can't build on farmland they own.
2rafa
17hr ago
I think Texas has it right with the high property taxes. 2% or whatever it is a year forces average old people who suddenly find themselves with a house worth a few million to sell quickly and downsize, that money typically makes its way in part to children and grandchildren or is just spent, all of which are good.
New Jersey has high property taxes and is still a dump, but that may be just a consequence of proximity to NYC and an uncommonly high (for America) level of corruption rivalled only by Illinois and the Deep South.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
20hr ago
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
21hr ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Forever
https://protectcoyotevalley.org/
In east Alameda countythere's enormous amounts of empty space. Much of the prime real estate in Santa Clara county is warehouses or other industrial areas, and much of the bay area is really shitty SFHes built on shoestring budgets in the sixties.
That's off the top of my head.
I don't know. I think if some activity X is generally banned, but with an exception for Y, then you remove the exception for Y, your action is fairly characterized as "banning Y." You used to be able to do Y. Now you can't. Sounds like a ban to me!
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