481–490 of 881 posts
Does the fairy-tale world that most HN users live in can answer these questions for me please?
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This is the point I was about to make, but you've put it better than me. As the traditional factory job disappears more and more, the aging population will provide a huge source of new caring/support jobs. We'll have to find a way to pay them a living wage, but then we had that problem with factory jobs in the early industrial revolution too.
The problem is care-jobs are incredibly low productivity. The reason a worker today is paid more than 100 years ago is, essentially, just that they can produce/transact with more people at once. A nurse "should" be paid what they were 100 years ago, as the number of transactions hasn't changed. The only reason they aren't is due to competition from productive sectors. But those productive sectors need to exist! In a…
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It might be logically valid, but it's pretty emotionally tone-deaf to blithely dismiss a long heartfelt personal account by saying "Survivor bias. Caveat emptor." Read the room, as they say.
OK, but it's also hacker news. If we just want positive anecdotes and feel-good inspirational stories that don't get debated, and which don't fully address the point or get to the heart of the matter, we could go to a Tony Robbins seminar, and I say this as a both a dad and as someone who doesn't want to go to a Tony Robbins seminar. Honestly, I appreciate the point counter point.
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It might be logically valid, but it's pretty emotionally tone-deaf to blithely dismiss a long heartfelt personal account by saying "Survivor bias. Caveat emptor." Read the room, as they say.
OK, but it's also hacker news. If we just want positive anecdotes and feel-good inspirational stories that don't get debated, and which don't fully address the point or get to the heart of the matter, we could go to a Tony Robbins seminar, and I say this as a both a dad and as someone who doesn't want to go to a Tony Robbins seminar. Honestly, I appreciate the point counter point.
I hope Humanity grows many orders of magnitude larger and expands across the galaxy. The universe will be a more interesting place. Some people here are saying this is good for the environment. Having 20% fewer people won't do that. Clean energy and other technology will. You can easily fit 100B humans on earth, with more of the earth dedicated to nature preserves. (Maybe a trillion people https://youtu.be/8lJJ_QqIVn…
I have no idea.
The Hacker News comment section tends to be factual, rational, and logical. So - this may be out of place, but here goes. When making decisions about whether or not to have children, we operate in a state of partial information. (This is of course true of all decisions.) I would like to contribute a bit of information. I'm 66, and have three children and four grandchildren. My adult children are the most wonderful pe…
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” CS Lewis
The Hacker News comment section tends to be factual, rational, and logical. So - this may be out of place, but here goes. When making decisions about whether or not to have children, we operate in a state of partial information. (This is of course true of all decisions.) I would like to contribute a bit of information. I'm 66, and have three children and four grandchildren. My adult children are the most wonderful pe…
This is a bit like hearing a successful startup founder speak about the joys of success. It’s absolutely correct, but it’s also just one data point. Keep in mind, most of the lonely old people you see have children. And I’m not sure it’s a good, caring thing to tell childless people that they will be lonely in old age, because it need not be true.
I had to give up a number of hobbies and intelectual pursuits in order to be there for my kids. Building a caring, trust-based long term relationship is hard work - sharing the same blood and providing a roof and a meal is not enough, which sadly is many people’s definition of parenting.
I know I am giving up things. I know there is no sure-fire bet that I will get “returns”, but I love my kids and knowing you can love someone so much is a gift by itself, IMHO.
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This isn't an uncommon point of view, and that's unfortunate. It's incredibly sad to hear people fearful of loneliness in old age, and even sadder to see people decide the solution is to oblige their children to spend time with them rather than seek meaningful cross-generational friendships with people who want to spend time with you. This is a genuine problem, and one that maybe tech could actually partially solve b…
If this is all you've taken from the above than we've read 2 very different comments. The point about lonely old people is only 1 (and i would say not the most significant) point in the argument. I have a wife and 2 (small) children. There is nobody in the world I love more than my family - it used to be only my wife previously and now grew from 1 person to 3. This has such a profound effect on my happiness now (in m…
I'm sure a lot of people don't have the kids with the purpose of not being alone in old age. But I also get that there's some kind of "soft expectation", for lack of a better term, that your "family" will kind of stick around, especially when you're alone because raising said family more or less led to a falling out with old friends. There's also the factor that when people get old, their own friends may have gotten old and died.
Where I live I don't see many "intergenerational friendships". Granted, I'm not a very social person so I don't really seek the society of others, but from what I see around me people tend to hang out with people of roughly the same age. There also seem to be a lot of loose friendships, in that people would get together more or less often, have a good time &c, but those are not relationships one would be able to depend on in case of a problem.
I think your point about fenced-off suburbs is quite important though. I figure that once people get older, it's much easier for them to try to hang out with other people if they all live more or less close-by. Such as joining some kind of club. Even if it won't become some very close friendship, at least they're less likely to feel as lonely as people in the suburbs.
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We have a good enough understanding of capitalism to know that the average person will not benefit from a shrinking labour pool. You have no clue just how devastating a shrinking population would be to an economy where the real average wage hasn't increased in 40 year.
The economy in Britain improved after the black death wiped out half the population.
Barring absolute chaos, people can generally plan for years and decades from now. Declining population is something we all know is coming. Those with wealth will, for the most part, hold onto it. Those born into wealth will, for the most part, hold onto it. Japan is always mentioned as the prime example of declining population in these threads, and while the population is declining and demand for labor is increasing, wages are not rising but poverty is. Maybe it'll change 10 or 20 years from now, but the trend is downwards for the average person.
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I can drive around the entirety of downtown Portland in about 5-10 minutes (depending on traffic). It would take at least an hour to drive around downtown Atlanta.
As someone that lives there let me tell you there is no "downtown" Atlanta. There is a neighborhood called Downtown, but it's one of three (four, or maybe even five, depending on who you ask) major, dense business and retail districts in the city limits, and even more in the suburbs. And yeah, would take you about an hour to hit all of them. Probably more with traffic. It's a very polycentric city. Kind of throws peo…