I think the big issue is that if wage increases are only coming from advancing in job positions, then the next generation of employees are effectively getting less. This could be why Gen Z males leaned more rightward than millennial males, because their earnings aren't keeping up with cost of living. I don't believe that they're going to keep supporting Republicans as they're probably just trying to shock the system. What happens to Gen Alpha and Gen Beta's earnings if their real wages are also declining.

It's the reason why even though I lean to the left, I agree with Republican conservatives (and pre-2016 Bernie Sanders) on the immigration problem, as it's being used as a wage suppression government policy. Birth rates are below-replacement so the domestic labor supply should have been shrinking and wages rising, but neoliberals circumvented it with a generous immigration (and likely unneeded) immigration policy, which looked like a modern-day indentured servitude/slavery scheme.

I cited South Korea as a modern-day example of below-replacement fertility. Asian countries, included South Korea, have typically demanded their employees to work long hours and then send their kids to be hyper-prepared for their capitalist economy. They still struggle to bring their maximum hours per week to 52 hours per week. Whereas France is usually at around 1.79 and has around 35 hours per week worked. Israel is the only first world democracy with above replacement fertility rates and it could be cultural, but they also have socialized daycares and Orthodox Jews keeping the population stable. And the Orthodox Jews are able to have large amounts of children, because they're being subsidized by other Israelis.

The big contrast is why are the conservative Asian countries so extreme in their fertility decline, compared to other first world countries now. Most of the economic tigers of the 1990s are turning into paper tigers since their fertility rates are all below-replacement and they will eventually collapse.

I'm only using the word "claimed" because we don't know each other. It's hard to trust everyone's personal story because it's not possible to verify it.

It also doesn't matter what society had done in the 1800s. Birth control is the technology game changer and gender equality in the workforce was the social game changer now and nation states haven't really responded that their citizens are now incentivized to avoid children. Children were a byproduct of sex beforehand. They no longer are since the invention of birth control and since the acceptance of gender equality in the workforce.

It's not a top measure of success, but if population keeps falling and persistently falling, then it's also a measure that the society is problematic. There's obviously other factors that determines a society's success, but those factors don't matter if the society continues to plummet in population until P = 0. It's not the only factor for a successful society, but it is fairly important if a nation wants to be able to defend itself and project power on the international stage.

The problem is that the corporate success and working long hours doesn't translate into societal level success. If everyone is working long hours due to employer expectations, individuals are not having time to dedicate to their personal life or to their family life. We can see birth rates across Asia, Europe, North America, South America, and Australia collapse. Right now, Africa is the remaining holdout to below-replacement fertility levels. If capitalism is such a raging success, why isn't it translating to stable population levels? A society's values need to be propagated and it appears that capitalism is causing everyone to chase after career building for short term abundance at the expense of long term stability of the society.

You had one son. Population stability is achieved at 2.1 children per individual. But for all your wealth and income that you're claiming, you didn't have enough to keep the long term interests of society continuing to exist.

Communist North Korea is at 1.6 fertility rate, but hyper-capitalist South Korea leads the world at 0.64 fertility rate. I wouldn't be making this critique against capitalism if fertility rates were positive, but they aren't. Parenting needs to be socialized and incentivized in order to still keep population stable, but that requires taxes from you to shift to people who can dedicate more time to raising children. A 32 hour work week frees up people's time to do other activities like parenting. A 60 hour work week leads to a societal extinction event. No rich person's opinion should matter if they don't figure out how to maintain population stability, but it really seems that the trick to keeping population stability is to have government policy that is counter to any rich person's motivations.

Doesn't Android Auto and Apple Carplay solve this problem though by just reading the message out loud when it's received? Android Auto will still run when the phone is mounted on to the dash, so any car can have a hands free option of using one's cellphone.

I think you're making the argument that it's possible to get more doctors into the field, but medical colleges are operating as cartels. They restrict the number of qualified applicants so we have persistent doctor labour shortages. North America isn't producing enough doctors even though their higher than average wages should be attracting more people to enter the field. I worry that Registered Nurse nursing programs are becoming hyper competitive too, such that the colleges never scale properly to our population growth.

I have two children, but they're still economic costs. A purely rational individual actor would avoid having children as the economic benefits don't outweigh the costs. So everyone chooses to have less than three kids, because there's no economic incentive to do so. And this is how you destroy your nation state as you need children created in order for working citizens to be created. We're witnessing demographic collapse in all the first world, in Russia, and in China. Iran and India are in the demographic collapse club. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk don't have children in proportion to their disposable income. They are not creating workers and soldiers in sufficient numbers for the nation state to continue to run. If they don't pay for other people's kids, then nobody has kids. Republican philosophy is very self destructive as there appears to be no plan to actually ensure that the nation state continues to run.

I should clarify that developed countries have below replacement population replacement rates. For the past 30 years, the domestic population has been trying to pull many countries into shrinking populations and slow moving extinctions. I don't think the first world is successful if it fundamentally has an issue keeping its population numbers intact. North America and Europe rely on immigration to keep their population above replacement. I actually think there's a resounding socialism critique in that capitalism creates a tragedy of the commons with respect to children. Capitalism doesn't incentivize their creation, so people choose to avoid having them to further their own career interests. We're left with a retirement problem in 50 years as there's less working class citizens able to service the needs of the retired.

Uhh, this is a contract that lacks consideration. The consumer agreed to a specific date when buying their tickets. The seller is changing the terms of their contract with no consideration for the ticket buyer. These contracts are usually voided as they consumer receives nothing beneficial for buying a ticket that could be postponed indefinitely.

Travelling close to c implies that space dust will be hitting any large vessel close to c too. Paint flecks from satellites are causing dents when they collide with other satellites in orbit around the earth, and the paint flecks are not moving anywhere close to c. Time dilated space vessels would require deflector shields to deal with relativistic particles smashing onto the ship.

Yeah, I was wondering how the author determined that "interstellar travel being impossible" was an implausible theory. Not every fantasy can play out, just because someone wishes it was the case. Our understanding of modern physics is working fairly correctly. There hasn't been anomalies discovered that challenge it, unlike when both quantum phenomena and astronomical phenomena challenged Newtonian physics.

Toronto also has "computer professional" overtime exemption laws, which basically says that programmers aren't allowed to receive overtime hours and are not even entitled to pay beyond the 40 hour base pay they receive. I'm happy that I work in Saskatchewan where I'm classified as a regular employee.

I'm a Canadian citizen that fully supports the NDP. If I was an American citizen, I would support Bernie in the primary and Hillary in the general as I viewed them both as more competent as Trump. I'm well aware that even if country 1 enjoys full absolute advantage in both goods, then they should still focus on making the good A they're better at and let the other country 2 make the good B that they perform worse at. However, there's a limit to that theory in that there's never infinite demand for any good, so country 1 can produce good 1 at some limit and use their excess employment capacity to still produce the other good. The myth of comparative advantage is that it assumes that a nation dedicating full employment to producing good A will somehow find infinite buyers of good A when actual production of good A is determined by supply and demand curves, not by theoretical comparative advantage utility based arguments.

I'm sorry, but the reason the US has been hemorraging jobs and racking up trade deficits is because China is not at full employment. So people move their manufacturing to China as China has an absolute advantage in wage and with China not being at full employment, it can continue to suck in more industries from other nations. Once China reaches full employment, then we can discuss comparative advantage, but comparative advantage doesn't apply when both nations aren't at full employment. You can't just brush away the concept of absolute advantages under the first year economics idea of comparative advantage. If comparative advantage was actually working, the US wouldn't be running trade deficits persistently for several years.

Comparative advantage is only useful when both countries are at full employment. China is not at full employment and so the absolute advantage China has starts kicking in.