War doesn't always start with a clear-headed, cold-blooded weighing of national interests. In fact I'd say that's the more the exception than the rule. Historically it's quite common for a country to start a war that in retrospect looks stupid from the standpoint of national interests.

Of course peaceful initiatives can be just as badly thought ought. We quite *deliberately* chose to tie our economy to China; I remember this quite distinctly. Although nobody anticipated the speed or completeness of the interdependency that would folow, everybody understood that we were choosing to head that way. The argument was a purely ideological one, whether interdependency per se was a *good* thing. And, as far as it goes, the argument was sound. If you don't nitpick too much, it worked out just as planned.

The thing that we really didn't put much thought into was *who it was we were choosing to become interdependent with*. China is, not to put too fine a point on it, an unstable and very dangerous powder keg. There is no rule of law; laws are enforced selectively by officials tied to an unaccountable and unrestrainable political party. There is no freedom of information, which means among other things you don't get economic data you can trust. The system is prone to sudden, opaque power shifts and the emergence of strong men who are legally, and sometimes politically unrestrained with respect to policy and military affairs.

And now we'd really like a little more distance from that powder keg, but our interdependence is the main thing that's stabilizing the situation. At least in the short term, until somebody does something that, in restrospect, will look really stupid. Which is inevitable, eventually.

What I see here seems to be people arguing from the predetermined biases without regard for the topic.

For example, claims of it having to do with abuse in any direction would require some substantial evidence.

But then, there's also bias in this:

"If you want to somehow tie feminism into the declining birth rates, especially given the relatively recent MeToo movement, a less tenuous tie would be the increase in awareness that women have to how abusive men are ..."

And in this:

"But it's the womens fault still?"

The idea of "fault" here seems to imply that falling birth rate is something that is wrong that needs to be blamed on somebody.

The available evidence of falling birth rate can actually be "tied" to feminism fairly easily, but in terms of women having choices and tradeoffs, including women becoming more educated and building careers. I don't think anybody would argue that these choices didn't emerge as a result of feminism. I don't know that anybody, or very many, would say that is a bad thing. Rather, an consequence of staying in school, going to university, and building a career is that marriage and having children is delayed, and having more children would mean more time out of their career.

For example, the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) summarizes the research nicely in their article, "Why is the birth rate declining" (May 6, 2021): "Between 2007 and 2020, the TFR in the United States declined from 2.12 to 1.64.3 This decline may signal a longer-term drop in lifetime fertility shaped by broader social factors, including postponement of marriage and childbearing to older ages and long-term increases in women’s educational attainment and labor force participation. Although most American women say they expect to have at least two children, many women delay childbearing whether by choice or circumstance to the point that they may end up having only one child or no children at all."

Refs:

Martin O’Connell, “Childbearing,” in Continuity and Change in American Families, ed. Lynne M. Casper and Suzanne M. Bianchi (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001).

Eve Beaujouan and Caroline Berghammer, “The Gap Between Lifetime Fertility Intentions and Completed Fertility in Europe and the United States: A Cohort Approach,” Population Research and Policy Review 38 (2019): 507-35, https://link.springer.com/arti....

You'll also note that while fertility rates declined for women of most ages, the rates actually increase consistently from the late 1970s to today for women in their 30s. That is, women have children much later than they used to, and have fewer of them total.

That is inconsistent with any links to abuse (in any direction). It a simple matter that the changing role and available choices of women -- which of course has a lot to do with feminism -- is a trade-off. There's finite time available. Women can't have children at the same rate as they used to, and stay home with them, and go to school, and build careers. That's impossible.

Instead, what we've learned is that when the choices are opened up, a very large portion of women prefer education and career over having children, or having them while young, or having as many. Is that a bad thing? It certainly has consequences on populations and demographics, but would it be better to declare the outcome "we" want and then force women to do the bidding to get that outcome?

By "we", I mean collective discussions about what "should" happen in society. A free country means the outcomes can't be dictated; if you want to dictate statistically outcomes, you have create an unfair, unfree society where individuals are forced to do what is necessary to get that outcome.

This is fundamentally the result of freedom along with the rapid increase in standard of living. People aren't forced into things by circumstance, government, or social pressure. (Sure, I've heard some objections that women have been pressured to not stay home and have children, but at the scale of whole population that would require a lot more evidence than pointing to a few feminist leaders who have said women shouldn't do that.)

It is what it is. It isn't a "fault" or a blame. It is an outcome of freedom and choice.

Presumably critters evolved to deal with noises that naturally and regularly occur in their native habitats.

This doesn't mean that natural noises that aren't regularly part of their normal habitat can't harm them. It's possible that animals whose range naturally overlaps the periodical cicadas do get harmed by that noise, but the harm is not significant enough to exert selective evolutionary pressure.

So natural isn't necessarily benign. Nor, do I think, is *unnatural* necessarily harmful. But dose does makes the poison, and cars do make a *lot* of noise. It's pretty well established that humans overexposed to car noise can develop health problems like cardiovascular disease. Since CVD mainly kills and disables people after their reproductive years, don't expect populations to evolve a biological tolerance for car noise though.

He's moving some assets into US companies because they're innovative. Fair enough.

He thinks they're innovative because they've got more hustle. OK. That's almost circular.

He thinks they've got more hustle because Americans work longer hours. That doesn't follow at all.

Sometimes you work longer hours because the boss forces you to, and you are giving him as little for the time as possible. Sometimes you work longer hours because you're disorganized, bad at planning and managing your time. I've seen that often enough. If hours worked equals hustle equal innovation, he should be putting his money into Cambodia, where workers put in 40% more hours per year than Americans. Sweden and Switzerland rank higher than the US in the Global Innovation Index, even though people in those countries work a *lot* less.

Innovation for a country is multifactorial. Wealth and education matter. Attractiveness to foreign investment; rule of law; those are really important things where America excels. Even sheer size makes a difference; being part of a massive integrated market is a huge boost to both the US and the EU. Sure, work ethic matters, but work *hours* is a lousy proxy for that. In some countries people put in six hours of honest hard toil each day then go home. Do they have less work ethic than a country where people spend ten hours a day at work but much of that "lying flat"?

"Encrypted email providers" had several lists/reviews on the first page that included Tuta, though their own site wasn't near the top.

If it works for them, are they wrong?

Except as labor standards drop, your choice is another job that does the same thing. About 17% of American workers don't have fixed hours or guaranteed workdays, which makes planning for work/life balance a farce, and the old standby of getting a second job to make ends meet is impossible.

73% of young Americans live paycheck to paycheck, 20% of whom have no savings at all and many of them have to spend 50% of their income on housing. This means they don't really have the ability to quit their job and look for another job where working conditions exceed the minimum legally allowable standards. Which is why legally enforced minimum standards are important. We need those young people to step up and start making babies.

Fertility rates have dropped in the US from roughly replacement (2.1 children/woman) to a catstrophically low 1.6. The US population would already be contracting were it not for immigration. Now a lot of this is social changes -- women choosing to delay childbearing to start a career. But consider South Korea, which has the lowest fertility rate in the world at 0.8. They're a much more conservative society than we are so it's not changes in attitudes that's driving that. The reason their fertility rate is so low is that they take people in their prime childbearing years and work them like dogs, in return for little prospect of economic security.

Don't you think if those young Koreans would quit their job and choose a higher paying job that gives them more leisure time if they could?

When I started working in the 1980s, getting your first job was like stepping onto an escalator that would carry you up to higher economic status. It's not like that now for the youngest generation of workers; it's more like stepping onto a treadmill. When we start to look to that generation to replenish the US population, our fertility rate is going to sink like a rock. The only way to keep the country running will be to open the immigration floodgates.

how much is the cheapest TV today compared to the 90s

You can't eat your TV. You can't drive your TV to the grocery store. You can't take your TV into the bank and get a home loan, nor can you take your TV to a home seller and get a reasonable price. You can't hand it to the university and be handed back an education. You can't give your doctor your TV and receive surgical or even preventive care or the meds you need.

Your problem (other than the root one of spewing disingenuous nonsense) is that you're looking at the pricing in the electronics sector and pretending it's representative of the extremely high basic living costs I called out (which of course it is not) — nowhere did I say anything about either the pricing of electronics or the need for a TV to achieve a reasonable cost of living. Nor should you have. But here we are.

On a discussion board I ran, I started a long running thread "Is this real, or The Onion?" challenging people to decide whether a headline was fictional.

It was hard. On one occasion it was both a real one and an Onion parody.

We are in Heinlein's Crazy Years, except he didn't foresee how weird.

Great news: someone lied to you... BEVs didn't need battery replacement every seven years.

As it happens, my daily driver is a seven year old BEV, a Tesla Model S. Its estimated range was 335 miles when new and is 315 miles now. Assuming we can trust the car's estimate (I, for one, do trust it) my car still has 94% battery capacity after seven years.

My car is far from worthless, but it's not for sale. I like it and I am keeping it.

Well, yes, there are trades. But the data shows that non-degree workers *as a whole* are earning about 25% less than they were in 1980.

You probably don't know any trans people personally. I grew up with the same beliefs about transgender people you have, until I actually got to know some of them. As impossible as it is for us to understand and as nonsensical as it appears to us, it's clearly not something most trans people choose.

It's OK for people to be different in ways we don't understand. Nobody has a duty to make sense to *us*. In any case, only about 0.6% of the population identify as transgender. Even if you completely outlawed gender reassignment surgery an gender-affirming care, it wouldn't budge the fertility needle even assuming trangender people decided to have children -- which they won't.

Of course, there's a counter example for any theory about people in general, so there's probably someone out there who chose it as a lifestyle. But that's just not the norm.

Also, employment is a lot less stable than it used to be. When I entered the workforce in the early 80s it was still common for people who were retiring to have worked for the same company all their lives. Young people now live in a gig economy; if they *do* work for a company, often they don't know how many hours they'll get from week to week.

And while things like TVs are cheaper than ever, essentials are often far more expensive. Median rents for a studio apartment in the US were about $250 when I got out of school; today they're $1200. If you have income twice the poverty rate and you follow the advice we were given back then to spend no more than 20% of your income on housing, you'd be looking to pay $483/month in rent. In most of the US even if you have roommates you'll be spending over $1000 per month.

Today it's more economically important to have a degree than ever. While wages for new college graduates have increased only modestly, wages for non-college graduates have dropped since the 1980s. Let's say you're thrifty and decide to commute to a state college. Your four year costs have risen from $3,200 to over $44,000. So families in their prime reproductive years are burdened with debt; it takes years to overcome that and to raise.

We often take poor families to task for being irresponsible and having children they can't afford, but the fertility rate in families below the poverty line isn't that high and it's remained steady for decades. What's happened is that the fertility rate at 200% of the poverty line has crashed.

Most women, with access to contraception and abortion, are doing what we told them is the responsible responsible thing. But if they *all* did it, it would be a demographic catastrophe.

"Women over 40 have the lowest birth rate" shouldn't come as a shock to anyone

Older does tend to mean wiser, after all. Well... okay, for some people.

Destroying middle class has predictable consequence of tanking birth rate. News at 11.

"We must have constant inflation or people might, you know, save!"

Then... basics cost (a lot) more and mid- to low-tier wages don't even come close to keeping up

Brutal housing, education, medical, food, vehicle, and fuel costs, crushing taxes on the lower tier workers... gee, sounds like a great circumstance to bring some ever-more-expensive rug rats into.

The "American Dream" is deader than Trump's diaper contents for a large swath of those of an age to be pumping out crotch goblins. But hey: The stock market is doing Great!

Or perhaps it's just that no one wants to hump someone with their pants falling off their butt — or otherwise dressing like a refugee.

Obligatory: get off my lawn.