They have actually turned their low birth rates around after a period of low rates. They are a sign that this trend of declining birth rates is not eternal and can be reversed.
Well some people don’t feel like all humans are perfectly identical interchangeable units. If you magically swapped the population of Ireland with the population Japan, do you think that the Japanese would suddenly behave like Irish people just because they were now living in Ireland?
Culture and identity are tied to nations, and just dropping millions of people from Africa into Europe doesn’t make them European.
If your answer is that they just assimilate, they often do not. Example: many churches are being replaced with mosques in London. That is not assimilation, that is simply replacing one population with another.
It is okay for a people who have existed for thousands of years to want their own country and culture to survive in its same state, even if the population shrinks for a while. These labor shortages and shrinking populations are not eternal, eventually the population will bounce back.
There is no officially published number by the government, but 3 signs you can look at:
1. anecdotal evidence, I have been to several in the UK myself. You can find converted mosques by using Google Maps as well.
2. You can find videos from UK Muslims celebrating their cultural victories talking about the churches they have converted. Here are two such examples:
Sounds like she’s a mean drunk? Or maybe she has her own trauma that you’re not aware of. Sort of a dehumanizing picture you paint.
It sounds like your broader point is that conservatives are all stupid and motivated by hatred. I kind of feel like you have plenty of your own hatred though but seem sort of blind to it.
I assure you that I am not missing some hidden trauma that complicates my aunt. What I described above is just a taste of the harm she's done to people.
Trauma is not an excuse or justification for the level of hatred described and especially not for years.
Unless someone is completely incapable of rational action (which has happened to me), there’s some level of personal responsibility involved.
I wouldn’t argue that conservatives are stupid and motivated by hatred. However, many people voted for a campaign of blatant hate and an explicitly stated desire for revenge. This definitely colors your view of anyone that doesn’t think this is a bad thing.
You seem to happily ignore who started this garbage, who's responsible for the orange shit stain on the entire country, who yelled "Fuck your feelings" when anyone disagreed, who refused to wear a mask to possibly prevent infections, but is quite happy to see their idiocy forced upon anyone else.
True, but also there is a commonly accepted rule in economics where taxing something disincentivizes consumption of that thing. Usually when you lift taxes on something you will see a rise in consumption on that thing. But it remains to be seen if the 15 year olds in this situation will be the ones to consume more of it.
The UK has people in prison for tweets and saying mean words. We do not have that; the first amendment is not a myth.
You called me a dilettante, I claim that is hate speech. It meets all the (current) criteria for hate speech.
Do you think that the government should be able to silence or punish you because I was offended by your insult? A world where that is true is a world where freedom and democracy die.
Language is context dependent and requires interpretation. I can easily take someone’s words out of context and they become hate speech, I can also easily misinterpret someone’s words and they become hate speech. What is fine one day can become hate speech the next under a different administration.
> The UK has people in prison for tweets and saying mean words. We do not have that; the first amendment is not a myth.
US seems not to understand yet, how fast words become deeds. Every oppression starts with words.
> You called me a dilettante, I claim that is hate speech. It meets all the (current) criteria for hate speech.
He/She actually didn't. He/She called ALL Americans dilettantes, not you personally. In the latter case, you may TRY to sue, which would with nearly 100% probability be dismissed by any court, since it's not really an insult.
> Do you think that the government should be able to silence or punish you because I was offended by your insult? A world where that is true is a world where freedom and democracy die.
The government has absolutely nothing to do with it. And yes, absolutely and definitely, every single person should be able to defend himself against insults. Why should you have the right to insult other people? Are you somehow better than them? Not in a country where law is respected and where every person is equal.
> Language is context dependent and requires interpretation. I can easily take someone’s words out of context and they become hate speech, I can also easily misinterpret someone’s words and they become hate speech. What is fine one day can become hate speech the next under a different administration.
And this ist exactly where it gets wrong - you don't decide anything. You MAY think that something is hate speech, you MAY think that someone insulted you - so you are allowed to fill a complaint, but there is INDEPENDENT JUSTICE that decides if you have the point or not. And they would dismiss any claims that have no substance. So if someone was fined (most usually somewhere about 1000-2000 Euros) then it was really an insult, if someone was imprisoned (pretty uncommon) then it was someone who repeatedly insulted other people (and was convicted multiple times) or was so incredibly offensive that it crossed the boundaries of civilised behaviour by so far that he had to be isolated from the society. I actually have no examples where people were imprisoned for the first-time insult or even for the first-time hate speech.
There is absolutely no danger to democracy if the laws apply to all people equally and if people are forced to communicate in civilised ways.
>how fast words become deeds. Every oppression starts with words.
Well illegal deeds are already illegal. Oppression is already illegal. Just enforce the existing laws if words you disagree with become actions.
The problem with this system where you say that “certain words lead to bad deeds, therefore we must silence bad words” is that it is so easily abused to silence anything that people in power don’t like.
“Independent justice” is just a group of people with their own biases. The point is still true that they are a body which can decide which types of (words) are okay to say vs others, you can simply change one day what qualifies as “hate speech”.
>Why should you have the right to insult other people?
Because words are words, they are information, and violence is already illegal. There are many cases where something is both an insult and TRUE, and being able to speak the truth is important in a democracy.
You can never speak truth to power or truly question anyone in authority because they will always have the power to lock you up (or fine you) for insults.
The court will take a dim view of your fatuous semantics, and I'll get summary judgement in my favour.
It is damning of your shithole country that, out of freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, justice for all, and the equality of all men, you picked the lies and the violence. You misunderstand "founding myth", but the sense of "falsehood" does also apply.
You believe that any compromise in free speech results inevitably in tyranny, while your Project 2025 gang takes office by way of twitter. They have implemented martial law. They are taking citizens off the streets. Neither yourself nor your benighted country has the intellectual tools to address that.
Your nation has a pipeline for sending blacks into chattel slavery for the enrichment of prison owners. You reckon you have something to say.
The cost to have one child via surrogacy is about 200k right now. That is simply not an option for the vast majority of people. Some people go that much into debt just for the chance to have one child.
There is massive upside here, people who suffer from fertility problems could actually have a shot at having a child. Same goes for gay people.
Every technology is dual-use, but this one strikes me as absolutely worth it.
For people worried about baby factories: this is already possible via surrogacy with humans, especially is 3rd world countries. Yet it’s not a problem, there’s no evidence that evil billionaires want or need to grow an army of slaves via surrogates. You still have to get sperm and eggs from a woman (the hardest part honestly, it can take many rounds under anesthesia to get enough for just a few viable eggs) and that is already a well regulated process. If you are an evil billionaire and want an army of slaves you are much better off just buying robots and paying some already alive adult humans to do your bidding.
Like with most technologies of this sort, I think it's often a matter of how well does it work.
But is it even ethical here to attempt to develop this? How many failed attempts does it take to refine it?
If the tech can magically spawn of nowhere and create totally healthy at birth and later in life children, I'm sure people will get used to the idea of it.
Judging by similar things like stem cells or cloning, if it causes serious issues for even a small number of children, it will turn public opinion against the tech overnight.
>and building two $250k houses will take twice the time and close to twice the costs
Building densely is actually more profitable, there’s already incentive to build as densely as possible for developers. Adding an extra story and creating a duplex, triplex, etc doesn’t cost much more and means you can sell multiple more units. Building as tall as possible and getting more units into the same footprint is almost always more profitable than just building one single family house.
The problem is that zoning limits what type of building is allowed to be built on a site. Who controls zoning? Existing homeowners that already live in the area, so of course they are going to make sure that new builds are low-density, as it impacts them less (parking, traffic) and keeps their home values high.
Source: I tried to build dense housing myself and was stymied by zoning.
There are many places in the US where you can buy a house for less than 50k.
If you want prices to drop in popular areas then we have to make it easy for people to actually build houses and increase supply in popular areas. Of course giving homeowners a say about whether housing is allowed to be built near them, of course they are going to vote against it because they have an incentive to keep prices high.
I think it’s natural for homeowners to be resistant to new builds in the same way office workers hated the move to cubicles.
I was in the Midwest recently and it was wild to see a block of high density houses in the middle of farmland. Houses that look exactly the same, shoved onto tiny lots with little gap between them, and surrounded by miles of corn.
These are obviously attractive to developers as they are maximized profit vehicles, but the downsides to everyone else are enormous.
In my opinion, we need to build housing above stores, so communities can actually work. Build a town, not a subdivision. What’s the point of a $50k home if you have to spend two hours a day driving to make it work?
For whatever reason, those houses get snapped up quick. I've lived in the midwest my whole life, and those cornfield subdivisions are hugely popular. I have a house near a small city, and I've had numerous friends and family ask me why I would live where I am rather than in one of the "much better subs".
I don't think people quite wrap their head around the fact that the US population love their cars and their huge subdivisions. A massive percentage of the US have no desire for walkable cities.
It is a bizarre alien thought to me, too, but it has become very clear to me.
My place is actually rural, but there's one of those little cornfield subdivisions (I like that term) a few miles from me. I don't really get it either. I like living in the country, but they don't seem to, since they bring their town ways with them, landscaping their places to a T like they're competing with each other, calling the police on stray dogs, and stuff like that. They don't seem to live any differently than they did in town, so I guess it's about the presumably cheaper land and the distance from noise and crime that makes up for having to drive 20-30 miles to town for work and groceries.
It's unlikely that the people in that rural subdivision are driving two hours a day for work. In the US Midwest, you're rarely more than 30 minutes from a town large enough to have some jobs. For instance, there's a town of 1100 near me that has a veterinarian, general store, post office, gas station, auto mechanic, school, a couple bank branches, and so on, which all employ people, some at pretty good salaries. And within ten miles of that town, there are a couple of those little blocks of suburb-looking houses like you describe.
Or the people living in them might be retired, or work from home, or work on local farms. Whatever the case, they're not driving a long way for work.
I would really love to see a billionaire tackle this. There's loads of empty, or nearly empty, space in this country. Heck, take over a town if you really want! Sink a few million dollars into kickstarting small-scale urbanism.
I'm not usually much of a billionaire-hater, but today's lot for the most part seems to be uninspired, when it comes to projects like this.
First institute a land value tax. If you have a regular property tax you are going to get speculators, and then eventually vacant lots
This is part of the housing supply mystery. It's not very profitable to build housing when you are punished for building upwards and making good use of the land
Some states are biasing property taxes more toward land value to get some trade off. The problem with a pure land value tax is that you can be forced to sell your home ir redevelop (if you can afford it) if your land value appreciates over time (this should happen eventually, but will happen perusals too quickly with an LVT). Also, services (schools) rendered with property tax money scale as more people live there, and if you go for pure land value, you wind up with some whacky rates to support schools.
I'm a big proponent of LVT, and even bigger of gradually replacing most taxes with LVT, but the great thing about being a billionaire is you can just buy up a whole town and develop it as you see fit and not have to worry about speculators engaging in rent-seeking behavior.
I don’t think you’ll ever see a billionaire tackle this. To become a billionaire, you have to have a complete lack of empathy.
This is why the only solution we see are maximized profit vehicles. The qualities that would make someone want to create a lovely place to live exclude them from making billions of dollars in the first place.
Did you both not see the project that is trying to do exactly this in Solana County CA and has had immense criticism at it, far more than positive coverage...
Looks like it's stuck in the typical hell of environment impact reviews and local politicians seeing how many sinecures they can obtain through the project. I wish the project well and will follow up on it.
Yes they do, there are many normal houses which can be bought for very cheap just spend some time on Zillow looking at areas outside of major metro areas.
You could very easily live in a big city and work a job to save up 50k or a down payment for a 50k mortgage and then buy one of these cheap houses to live in. But most people don’t want to do that. They want nice weather and fun things to do, access to a good job market, and good schools. But the reason why those houses are 50k is just because of simple supply and demand. There is very little demand to live in Louisiana or West Virginia and tons of demand to live in the Bay Area or Seattle. If you increase supply, eventually prices will fall and accessibility will increase.
The demand isn’t there because there is no supply of money… it’s much safer for your life/family if you live in an area with an abundance of employers and not a small town with very few employers and low wages.
Also these areas have poor education systems for kids.
I agree with all of that, but I think there is additional nuance. I would love if the path were as simple as:
(1) Make housing easier to build.
(2) Receive sufficient housing supply.
Even if you make it easier to build houses, there is a market for the capital that housing developers access. Currently, that market also assumes that prices will go up (or at least not go down). Thus, once we go far enough past the point where existing prices are higher than the return on new housing, even all of our dream reforms may not lead to a flood of new housing starts.
I want to be clear: loosening zoning, reforming regulations, and so forth, are all still worth doing. It is better than nothing. But if the result is a shock of supply, the financing for new homes from the biggest players will dry up. That doesn't make a solution impossible, but it does complicate it.
That does indeed seem to be a problem but there's a flip side. If you can't afford to buy a thing, then renting it is actually preferable. Rental is normally fine, unless there is a virtual monopoly on housing that forces people to rent and manipulates prices. In the absence of a monopoly, the rental price is just the time value of the place plus a reasonable service fee decided by a free market.
Woz is one of my favorite people ever, a lifelong hero for me.
I think it’s important to remember that he is the product of a very unique time in world history though.
He grew up in a time and place that was arguably the best time ever to be a human in all of history. He grew up in a society with extremely high social mobility, when a house in the bay was cheap, in a homogeneous society with high social trust, surrounded by the smartest people of his generation, in a place in the country which valued open mindedness and true progressive thinking. Things like going to college, buying a house, paying rent, or finding a mate were orders of magnitude easier than today.
Optimizing for happiness is a nice pursuit if this is the society that shapes your worldview, but today this is a luxury view that very few people can afford. The world is much more of a rat race, we have significantly lower social trust, basic survival is much harder to achieve than Woz’s time. So few people can go through life just trying to be happy instead of grinding to get ahead.
Great comment. This quote from Hunter S Thompson comes to mind (although he is referring to middle sixties so Woz would have been a teenager, not quite the 70s young adult)
> “Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
This is spot on. Nicely written! I think many people forget what a great, unique, and exciting time those decades were. (Or many simply did not experience them).
There was a palpable sense of nearly unlimited potential for a brighter future, powered by technology.
As someone who experienced those decades, present day feels like a dystopia in comparison.
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