Personally I think the culture has changed. It's got little to do with costs or insentives or support and everything to do with changing wants/desires. Rather than devote 20+ years of a person's life to kids, most people would rather socialize, party, dance, netflix-and-chill, youtube, tiktok, travel, game, raise a pet, hobbies, etc....
Many countries have tried giving every incentive possible. Cash bonuses, tax breaks, a year+ of mandatory child leave for both men and women, cheap child care, mandatory flexible hours, housing subsidies, cultural campaigns.
Some of them have a short term effect but none of them get the numbers up to replacement levels and the numbers keep going down.
It's hard to blame it on any one thing. Some might say "suburban car centric culture" but that doesn't explain Japan, Korea, Singapore, etc....
I can't personally imagine the numbers going back up.
>> Many countries have tried giving every incentive possible. Cash bonuses, tax breaks, a year+ of mandatory child leave for both men and women, cheap child care, mandatory flexible hours, housing subsidies, cultural campaigns.
Those incentives are usually meaningless. Like 100€ monthly cash bonus. Could cover food, but nothing more. A year of child leave is good, but what to do during next 5 years untill you can put kids into the school system?
And don't forget massive opportunity costs. Instead of having a single kid, woman can have few more years of advancing in career. Instead of putting all time into one kid, woman can upskill, get a degree, etc.
And with second child it's three times harder.
Also turns out, many baby boomers are not eager to be present in life of their grandkids. If you pregnant - you are screwed. You and the father-to-be will take a massive hit in every aspect of life.
Do you have sources of such countries? I know at least one case - russia (before the war) - where they gave out cash and really cheap mortgages and it caused a little baby boom so it worked. I have not heard of any such programs in the developed world…
In France, the policies are measurably motivating having more children according to some studies (can't link them right now). The effect size is on the order of +0.3 to the TFR rate or something like that.
The are many programs like this all over the world; the issue with them is they don't give out enough money/resources to have a measurable positive effect - they should be much much more funded. Incidentally the biggest baby boom in my country (Slovakia) was during the largest buildout of cheap accomodation for young families in the history, also the maternity leave was increased to 3 years and there were various subsidies. So I think policies like that work if they are properly funded.
I think the failure in extrapolation is that the numbers will absolutely go back up, eventually. Subcultures that incentivize high birth rates culturally will have more kids, and eventually come to dominate society.
If you want to see what culture will look like in a few hundred years, try and figure out what’s common between Mormons, Amish, and Muslims.
That's only really applicable to evidence in criminal cases obtained by the government. No such doctrine exists for civil cases, for instance. It doesn't even bar the government from using evidence that others have collected illegally of their own volition.
USA is a beautiful place to visit and people are very hositable. I think that there's a big difference between what people do and what the state does. I do agree however, that what is happening in this country right now is deeply concerning.
The same can be said about just about any country.
Based on the way Americans vote, I don't think that hospitality is there for the majority of Americans. I know the way the American system of politics has shifted to a binary choice doesn't leave much room for nuance when it comes to specific policies, but when Americans were faced with a choice between a racist, misogynist, fraudulent, insurrectionist sex offender and anyone else, they showed their values.
Plus, the country's leader announced he was considering invading a close ally, that kind of threat cannot be ignored either, though it's only one of the more recent threats to world peace that only happens to hit close to home for me. I'm sure people in the Middle East and Central or South America will have heard this kind of talk before.
In the same vein, I hope people judge my country for the fact that right extremists that have held a significant amount of power for years now. There are hospitable, kind people in every street in every town, but I won't pretend the average person will be like that; voter demographics have definitely been a continuous source of disappointment for me. Perhaps that's one of the downsides of democracy: the people of a country show their true colours quite publicly, and can't hide behind "that's just what the regime thinks".
You're right about the beauty, though. America is a very pretty place.
> but when Americans were faced with a choice between a racist, misogynist, fraudulent, insurrectionist sex offender and anyone else, they showed their values.
Don't forget serial cheater with multiple divorces (supposedly the choice of the religious people of "family values"), blatantly corrupt out in public, borderline senile (seriously, listen to the guy speak for more than a minute, it's barely coherent), mocking disabled people, etc etc etc.
How that person is even seriously taken as a candidate, let alone actually winning anything, is genuinely beyond me. Especially for a second term after multiple convictions inbetween.
> I think that there's a big difference between what people do and what the state does
One of most famous speeches in U.S. history talks about a government that is “of the people, by the people, for the people.” If the State behaves in a certain way, it is of the people. Many people who cast their vote for the current regime are perfectly cordial in face-to-face interactions; but nonetheless they gave their consent to these policies. There is a deeply divided plurality, of course, but I’d rather limit my visits to the U.S. regardless of its natural beauties or the hospitality of its populace, be it real or superficial. Were I a student from outside the U.S., forget it, I would never consider it a safe option for post-secondary education. The absolute risk of serious harm, I imagine, is low; but who needs this humiliation?
Speaking as a Northern neighbour of the U.S., it rings hollow when we hear American state politicians telling us that they love Canadians and really hope we visit more (tourism is down) and go back to buying American (exports are down).
The American government is waging economic war on us with the openly announced intention of annexing us. American pundits (and the idiot ambassador Trump sent us) tell us to downplay it, but the president keeps bringing it up!
I'm still working to cut more American goods and companies out of my life. I'm sorry, but Americans are responsible for what their government does. If you wish to be forgiven, you must first stop doing what you say you're sorry for!
I think most of us would like to get rid of our idiot president, but the only way to do it now is impeachment, which would require breaking the Republican majority in both houses of the legislature. It could possibly happen next year in the mid term elections, but it's going to be tough.
> USA is a beautiful place to visit and people are very hospitable.
There’s a high degree of variability there based on location, your English fluency, and skin color. I know people who’ve had very different experiences based on that - it’s why my white European friends never think twice about going on a backwoods camping trip but some from Africa or South America stopped. Even if most people are nice, the ⅓ or so set the tone for the entire trip.
Whilst that is nice to know, these are real tangible barriers to entry. Both literally and by making it a far less attractive place to cross the border.
As a very run of the mill Australian, I would not feel safe crossing your border right now. The overreach, lack of transparency and documented instances of recent abuse put it at about the same risk as Russia or China. If border force is having a bad day, bad luck, you get fucked over with no recourse, no transparency. Too bad.
Many games I would like to play are Windows-only, so that kind of sucks, but then again, I installed Windows 11 just for this purpose. So not complaining, until my programs and games will stop working when Windows 13 (or whatever) comes out. I had to upgrade from Windows 9 to 11 because it became obsolete and unsupported.
> Proton is a new tool released by Valve Software that has been integrated with Steam to make playing Windows games on Linux as simple as hitting the Play button within Steam.
I was super pissed when epic announced dropping Linux support for Rocket League. Once it was done, I fell in love with Proton, it ran better than both the native Linux version, and the Windows version on Windows.
But it does not offer me a clickable "Play" button for exclusively Windows games, unfortunately. Or is this something else? Or perhaps I have to do some configuration of some sort? I am really not sure. It works for games that have Windows + Proton (icon / logo), but the games I want have only windows.
It does, you'll probably have to enable proton in Steam settings. Also, in the store pages, you can see Steam Deck compatibility rating (and details about that) which means linux in practice. Some warnings regarding small text in some games don't apply to bigger displays, of course.
It works out of the box here? Steam supports running most "Windows-only" games on Linux without trouble; you may just have to select the Proton version once.
I don't remember when I last encountered a game that didn't run. I'm sure those exist, mind. Perhaps I've just been lucky.
Genndy Tartakovsky is a truly unique creator. Samurai Jack was so good, that I had to watch how it ends years later since watching the show on cartoon network
It doesn’t appear that Tartakovsky was affiliated at all with Pantheon. I would have been surprised if he was affiliated given the show’s fairly mundane animation.
So what about Pantheon? It doesn’t seem relevant to this discussion apart from it also being animated.
