Correct, the headline should be: Why is Fertility So Low in EXPENSIVE Countries?

The reality is that 'high income' more likely than not means high prices, constant pressure to keep earning money, because there are very few things in 'high income' (expensive) countries that doesn't cost money. We are constantly forced to pay taxes, never mind that in expensive countries large parts of the population live in dense urban areas, in cities and nobody has land that they can live off of. If you have no source of food other than the store and you cannot avoid paying taxes and paying high costs of owning or renting a property, then you are constantly under pressure to earn money.

In an expensive country you have expensive government and this government never ceases to pressure you to pay more taxes, makes things truly unaffordable by pretending to give it to you for free, basically in expensive countries you are forced to provide not only for yourself and for your children and maybe for your elderly parents, you are forced to provide for your expensive government.

An expensive government is obviously the cost of running the government itself, salaries, pensions, buildings, all expenses but it is also all of the laws, that are constantly adding more and more expenses to the system, thus mostly forcing the government to get deeper into debt and to steal your purchasing power through inflation (money printing).

Under these circumstances people who have access to contraceptives will use them almost always and this prevents almost all unwanted pregnancies. The other part of the population is just too stressed out and too tired from constant earning to pay for all of this 'high income' expensive stuff.

At the end children become a luxury for those, who can afford just a little more than the other guy or they become a way to suck money out of the system itself by getting onto various programs. They are an irrational choice for many, so to have them you either have to have a direct financial incentive or to be irrational or to be wealthy enough to afford them.

just play human music at 5% processing and keep the settings on auto, we'll deal with this later.

Are they really looking for intelligence in these LLMs or are they missing something else that slows down their progress? Is it intelligence, that we are trying to get out of LLMs? If so, I think they can be easily at least as 'intelligent' as anyone, they certainly have more information than any one person does. Maybe what they are looking for and not finding just cannot be found that way, that's because it is not intelligence they are looking for but some form of organic animal like behavior? In that case they will be looking for a while, not until we have robots everywhere that are more than a camera on a car, something that can touch, taste, smell, feel pain, hunger, consume to sustain itself, will the new level of 'intelligence' appear.

Maybe the real question is why bother having children, to bring them into the world where they are really unwanted by the entire society?

Has to be the USA government, I mean 30 billion yearly... serious money.

It has been brewing for a long time, if someone declared to be Napoleon, he would have been assessed for schizophrenia. Today when a man declares he is a woman, he is be offered a way to transition (mutilate himself) and his experience is glamorized and presented to children as a heroic act of self discovery that should be admired and followed. It is not only that we don't treat mental disease, we celebrate it. What else can one expect from society that promotes body positivity as a way to justify unhealthy behavior? If someone is obese, a doctor should suggest that it is not healthy and propose a treatment plan, society should help, not goad the person into showing it off in a weird and sick exhibitionist parade.

Right, Bernie will have you believe that this means that the men loading trucks by hand became more productive, yet they are the ones who will not be working at all once their jobs are automated. It is always the company that becomes more productive, the people who own the company invest in new tools and by doing it they reduce their future expenses and improve throughput, this makes *them* more productive, not the people who used to do the work that is about to be automated. The company spends its capital, becomes more efficient. For whatever reason Bernie says that now, that the company is more productive, he will take the productivity gains away from the people who risked their capital to achieve it.

When the society discourages productivity, it loses productivity, this is why Americans lost their manufacturing sector.

When the society discourages capital formation, it loses capital, that is what America will find out as well.

Oh, my goodness, so many excuses. Everyone I know, who runs their own business did it *against* odds, not because they had something given to them, like 5 day pay for 4 days of work. I know people who mortgaged their own houses, sold their cars to start their business. I know people who run multiple properties and they are doing all of the work themselves, cleaning, renovating. I know people who ran a successful business, sold it, started another business and again, it was a success. They complain about things, but they do them and nothing can stop them short of death.

Lets say you start a company and you use AI to build a bunch of code and help you to devise processes that deal with client lead generation and new client onboarding, client retention and such. You do it all by yourself, lets say it brings you 100,000USD a month (you think it's impossible? I think it's very possible today, for example you can do that with a youtube channel). Does this mean that you do not deserve something and a lid should be put on something, so that what? So that a guy from the street, who doesn't have anything to do with you can get a cut of money you generate? Why?

But that's not what most businesses are like, most businesses are people starting something on their own, eventually hiring a few more people and maybe scaling up a little bit. A few shawarma shops, a few laundromats, a few properties, maybe a delivery business, maybe a few convenience stores, that's what most people would do and that's if they are successful at running at least one of them first.

If they find a way to use AI for example to make themselves more productive by automating their phone lines, by doing some marketing with AI that they have never had a budget for anyway, Bernie thinks now they have to do what, cut the hours of all of their stuff by 4 days a week? OK, who is going to be manning the stations the 5th day, the 6th day, in some cases the 7th day? (yeah, I think it's really great if a business is open 7 days a week, over 300 days a year hopefully, very useful).

The question of 'deserve' is funny, what does it mean, who deserves what? Are you an IG girl, who dates older guys so that they would pay for her traveling and expensive shopping habits? If you talk to those girls, that have it down - they *know* they 'deserve' this and that and the other thing, they always know it. It's because it's easy for them, 'if you're done with your ex, move onto the next', etc.

Unless you are in this much of a demand, you can't have this type of a world outlook, thinking that you 'deserve' something, it's nonsense. You take what you can make, what you can get, that's the reality. If you can put up another shop and make another 5K or whatever a month, good for you, that's why you are going to be a millionaire and not a bum. There is no such thing as 'collecting money', by the way. The moment I have a few spare dollars I either buy something for myself (rare) or I put it to work, I start another project, I buy more parts, I invest into more development or marketing or think of a way to use it to lower future expenses, whatever. Money is a *tool*, it is not a thing that people collect for itself. It is a tool that allows one to build more income streams. Who taught you economics, Marx?

Somehow Bernie thinks that businesses owe to hire people and pay them for the sake of hiring people and paying them. Businesses are started to make the money for the people who start them, wow, a huge revelation. Have you ever started a business, tried running anything, a proverbial lemonade stand? If you have, have you hired people to sit there and do nothing? What if you started a lemonade stand, made some money, bought a juicer, used that to make more money, started another stand, hired a person. Would you pay them above the market rate? What is a market rate, you may ask? It is the rate that people in the area would be willing to show up for and to interview for your new lemonade stand position. You would have a few different people, mostly without any experience, you probably wouldn't have to pay much to man your point of sale. Would you pay them the same for being at work for 4 days as for 5 days?

Bernie can point out whatever he likes, you cannot escape a simple fact - if running a lemonade stand brought in money, there would be competition and people would be willing to find ways to automate as much as possible and to reduce prices in order to gain market share. Keeping prices low enough for people actually to buy your product while paying people for 5 days of work while they are only working 4 days is an incompatibilities in goals, you can do it until competition comes in and shows you what true efficiencies may look like. Ideas like that of Bernie is what moved production out of the Western world (USA in this case) and to places like China (and now Vietnam and others). Trying to put a lid on this development at this point is not going to work.

Years ago on this very site I noted that a country that loses manufacturing due to its socialist policies will inevitably lose engineering and will then lose education system as well. America is about half way there, there is still engineering, but it sure lost manufacturing. Try to go down the road and find a company that can make a tool that you need to make tools that you need to make products that you want. Even if you find some old guy somewhere, making dies and casts, the prices are still not going to be anywhere near close. AI is nothing without manufacturing.

I work for myself, I have 3 companies to run, who is going to give me a 4 day work week and what would that look like? Also if I could have a 4 day work week today, I would start another company and would run out of the week days anyway. Actually I have people working for me 4 days a week, this is because we run around the clock, 24x7x52 and some shifts are less attractive to the hires, especially the weekends, so we have to compensate with flexibility, but everyone is on the clock anyway, it is up to the person to decide if he or she wants to work more hours. I am always amazed at people just coming up with broad statements like that: everyone must have a 4 day work week! What does that mean? Silly simple solutions to real world problems don't work.

I have cars with very basic controls, but even then, one of them has a screen (and a number of basic controls for AC anyway).. I know foe sure that a phone in my hand with the map on it or with a YouTube channel (I listen, I watch the road) is much easier from point of view of reaction speed than the car's touchscreen. A phone I can glance at for a fraction of a second and control it from memory mostly, the car's screen is so much slower, it requires much longer time to deal with its interface Using a touchscreen in a car is more dangerous than a phone, for sure.

His slogan should be "Everyone's listening!", because it's going to be FBI, CIA, IRS, DHS, DOT, FHA but also the ruzzians and Chinese and Hegseth's wife.

Well, I think it is only possible to make this movie now, after a decade and a half of bullshit that has been pushed onto everyone by various pro trans, pro socialist or even pro Marxist movements.

Now that Trump is running (and likely ruining) the place, it is possible to come out with anything I think and who is going after Brooks, what are they going to do, cancel him? :)))