Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that you don't just put child seats into the car for fun - you are supposed to put children in them too. Children are not going to teleport in and out and they need to crawl/be put in their seats. The middle seat will be a hard reach in a compact.
That is a wholly different argument from “they won’t fit”. I absolutely agree that a larger vehicle is more convenient for people with 3 or more kids. But that isn’t the argument people have been making in this thread. The assertions it that you can’t fit 3 car seats in these cars, an assertion which is provably false.
Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate
391–400 of 411 posts
Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't forget the 5th row. My van has 15 seats. I'll fill the final seat this summer. The safety problem is that most drivers can't deal well with a suspension that lets the vehicle movement lag well behind the driver inputs. Drivers would roll the vans over while driving on perfectly straight roads with good pavement. It's the same as pilot-in-the-loop oscillation. When the vehicle has a delayed response, the operato…
I don't get it, do you have 13 children?
Car seats go in rows 2 and 3, since those are easiest to reach from the side door. It helps that our state hasn't totally caved to the car seat industry lobbying.
Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a wholly different argument from “they won’t fit”. I absolutely agree that a larger vehicle is more convenient for people with 3 or more kids. But that isn’t the argument people have been making in this thread. The assertions it that you can’t fit 3 car seats in these cars, an assertion which is provably false.
I don't see anybody making the argument that no 3 child seats can fit in a compact car, I've only responded to your post claiming that Americans drive giant cars and using the bestseller list as a proof.
Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a wholly different argument from “they won’t fit”. I absolutely agree that a larger vehicle is more convenient for people with 3 or more kids. But that isn’t the argument people have been making in this thread. The assertions it that you can’t fit 3 car seats in these cars, an assertion which is provably false.
I don't see anybody making the argument that no 3 child seats can fit in a compact car, I've only responded to your post claiming that Americans drive giant cars and using the bestseller list as a proof.
Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please RFA more ;) "the third-child deterrent appears stronger among wealthier families" So this has both the most and least effect on families that have little reason to care about needing a bigger car (because they can easily afford it, or they can't afford any car at all, respectively). When you go fishing for a correlation, form a post-hoc hypothesis for its mechanism, and then other data fits that hypothesis poo…
With increasing wealth, per-child cost goes up. It's self-imposed of course. Getting a larger Porsche or BMW or Mercedes is going to be harder than getting a larger used Hyundai or Kia. At the extreme, you're just out of luck; there is no Ferrari with more than 4 seats.
Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Americans buy way more large SUVs and trucks than the rest of the world, even those with fewer than three kids Having had two kids in the age where they needed large car seats, trucks are no help at all and even fairly decent sized SUVs don't handle more than two well. Car seats for young children are a significant issue, and I suspect almost anyone whose had two or more children under the current safety regime wou…
> Having had two kids in the age where they needed large car seats, trucks are no help at all and even fairly decent sized SUVs don't handle more than two well. Nonsense. They don't fit your seats maybe, but that's not the same as it not being possible. 15 seconds of Googling finds tons of lists with car seats that'll fit 3 across, including tests for a Honda Civic . Some on the list include convertible ones that'll…
Having 2 or 3 kids in a city is probably the worst plan. Costs are high, but not not quite high enough to make the career obviously a mistake.
Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
A Full-size sedan fits 3 child-seats, if you choose an appropriate thin design of seat.
> A Full-size sedan fits 3 child-seats, if you choose an appropriate thin design of seat. If all three are of such a design, which only exist meeting the requirements for child safety seats for older children. If any one is an infant seat, that doesn't work. If you have N children of ages requiring safety seats, you will for some period of that require at least 1 infant seat and N -1 other seats to transport them all…
Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
A slow rate of decrease doesn't really run into issues. To use the number of 1% per decade again, if we kept that up for 300 years we'd have no worker shortages as we slowly crept down to a "mere" 240 million people. (For reference, the population in 1950 was 152 million.)
Don't you still run into labor force participation rate issues due partly to wealth accumulation when shrinking the family size? For example, if you receive your parents inheritance at age 50, you might be inclined to retire early. Even if you have to split it with one sibling, that could still be enough for early retirement depending on the specifics of the assets.
Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
Medicare pays primarily for emergency hospitalization scenarios (referred to as Part A). Anything that happens outside of a hospital stay (called outpatient services) and medications come from Parts B, C, and D. Coverage for parts B, C, and D is insanely complicated and involves some means testing and who knows what else. There’s private health insurers involved too, and if you can’t afford that, then you can go to t…
Yep. I would rather have them give me that 3% to invest myself. Investing $2k annually for 40 years could yield me $250k-$350k at retirement age. But I guess I'm just a dumb peasant who can't take care of myself.
They can't give you that 3% to invest yourself because then they have nothing to give people that are already retired.
> But I guess I'm just a dumb peasant who can't take care of myself.
Here's the rub. You, and many people, are likely able to manage that yourselves. Some people can't. They may already be poor and behind on their bills, so they'll put that 3% towards fixing the transmission in their car that hasn't worked for 3 months. They might be an entrepreneur with a poor sense of risk, that empties that money to start an underwater basket weaving college. Or they might just be bad for money.
If we let people manage that themselves, what do we do when someone has to retire because of medical issues, but can't afford health insurance or the medical care they need? Do we just let them die? If we treat them, then everyone is subsidizing their healthcare, at which point you're investing 3%, but you're also paying a 1% tax to help cover all the people that didn't invest their 3%. At a certain point, the most sensible thing is just to not save your 3% and join the people the government takes care of. At some critical mass, we're just back to Medicare.
Of course, if we're willing to tell people "You should have saved money, we're not going to help you. Please die close to the graveyard to make our lives easier." then that arithmetic changes dramatically, but I don't think that's a world I care to live in.
Re: Child-safety laws may reduce the birth rate
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, that's mostly due to feminism as some of the already buried comments here point out. You only have to look back a short time and there was no such thing as "child care". The children were cared for by their mothers. Imagine that! A mother having time to raise her own children! Now they are "free" to be drones in the corporate machine instead and can't get out because the family needs that money. The children no…
Pretty sure the economic impact of doubling the workforce as well as decades of frozen wages has had a significant effect on social acceptance of 2-worker households, but blame whatever boogeyman/woman you'd like to.
The line of thinking here is that feminism caused 2-worker households, which doubled the workforce, which caused wage stagnation. Basically that doubling the workforce crashed the price of labor, but companies were unable to reduce everyone's salaries, and instead stagnated wages until inflation caused them to fall to the new price of labor.
I find it crass to blame feminism for that, though. Women should have always been free to join the workforce, and the problem is really 2-worker households, not that women are able to work. I think single-worker households address some of these issues, but there's no reason to point and say women were the problem. It's just as valid for the wife to go work and the husband to take care of the house.
Single-worker households aren't going to make a comeback, imo. For one, we, as a society, don't really respect homemakers. It's unskilled labor, and we grant it about as much value as most unskilled labor. And the more likely you are to be able to afford having a single-worker household, the more drastic the gap in prestige between the worker and homemaker becomes, which creates a weird power dynamic. I.e. if you're a hotshot lawyer and your wife stays at home, that's a huge gap in how you're perceived by other people. The second reason is that wages have effectively fallen through stagnation and inflation. Even if we forced all households to only have a single worker tomorrow, I'm doubtful wages would rise to where they might have been. Third and finally, a lot of homemaking is stuff people don't really want to do. Time with the kids is great, but does anyone really enjoy vacuuming, or cleaning the bathroom, or doing dishes? This might just be my perspective bleeding through, but the work itself seems awful. And worse yet, you do it either almost entirely alone, or while children are playing/screaming/fighting around you. It's physically demanding, and generally not mentally stimulating.
Longer-term, I would bet that the solution to this is a) more optimized services (i.e. a cleaning service that cleans all the houses on your street, like landscaping people often do), and b) robotics that are able to handle small bits of this. Roomba is a good example. They're reasonably effective at vacuuming. Give it a decade and they'll probably be able to actually replace vacuuming. We will also need a way for people that can't afford the upfront price to have one, which will probably come forth in the form of a subscription (give us a $100 deposit, and then we'll charge you $1 every time it runs).