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.

This is statism, writ large.

You get paid for work you PERFORM, but not work you RECORD. Copyright is anti-individual rights and liberties.

I'll be glad when Ai truly replaces all of these artists.

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

Tell me then. I was informed from a reasonable Independent that as a Democrat, I tend to "demonize" MAGAs. It does seem easy. So, tell me what you love about the "Big Beautiful Bill"? Honestly, let us talk. I tried before to talk with MAGAs, and in the end it always boils down to a MAGA doing personal, six grader types of attacks.

I wasn't intending to defend the merits of the bill. I personally hate deficit spending. I'm also not a MAGA. I was saying it was a very poor and misleading title. It's a 900 page bill, and climate is a handful of line items on a laundry list of changes: https://www.crfb.org/blogs/bre...

That said, there are some things in it I do like. Like no tax on tips, and alot of senior assistance. But that's neither here nor there. The bill itself overall is poorly designed, as it's yet another example of modern day deficit spending both sides have egregiously acquiesced to making the status quo

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.

"In exchange for this you will get access to substantially more money than if you didn't go to college."

No you don't. You have a CHANCE to access that.

The problem is there are much more college graduates than jobs that warrant that "substantially more money".

The hardest hit are those with certain arts or humanities jobs -- at least as far as pay. a BA/BS just isn't going to win you that 6-figure pay to allow someone to pay off their student loans unless you planned your major very well.

To be fair, some of the blame goes to employers. They want experience and real world skills -- which virtually NOBODY has right out of college. Its like they are hunting unicorns instead of training horses.

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

House Passes Bill That Slashes Solar, Wind and EV Tax Credits

What a terrible spin-laden uninformative title. That bill includes a ton more provisions than just that. That title makes it seem like it's exclusively a climate bill

Oh come on.

We've been saying "Thanks, Biden!" for years as a joke, and you blue haired legbeards always got riled up with your "source????" and "citation needed???" cries.

(FWIW I don't support Trump and have never voted Republican).

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.

Yeah, needs a ton of oversight, etc, I have to read it carefully...

So I wanted to do a thing, and I could easily have made a working prototype of this thing in a couple of days, maybe a week tops. So I had claude do it and spent nearly an entire afternoon fixing things or making claude fix them because I understood the problem better.

But at the end of the day, I'd spent an afternoon doing something I would have expected to take a week.

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.

This is such cry-baby nonsense.

NONSENSE.

Since 2008, I have personally mentored dozens of young dudes (at no cost whatsoever, just because that's what successful people do).

I have helped poor dudes in bad neighborhoods buck up, get some side hustles, stack cash, and buy property.

You fucked yourself because you refuse to actually do someone to buy property. I don't know ANYONE, starting with even zero money, who couldn't find a nice home in just 2-3 years of saving money properly -- except the lepers in California, and fuck them anyway.