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On Car Seats as Contraception

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Re: On Car Seats as Contraception

#71

Post by gruez »

aporetics wrote: post #65

I think rock climbing is the best thing ever. In the long run, the experience of rock climbing will spiritually reinvigorate the public. I want more people to rock climb. It’s the knots that are the problem. They take so long to tie, and every gym you go to makes you take tests to make sure you know how to tie them and then vocally double check that they are secure. Studies show that if people didn’t have to spend ti…

>We should remove any regulations around ropes and knots for rock climbing gyms so more people will rock climb.

we already have that.

>Bouldering is a form of free climbing that is performed on small rock formations or artificial rock walls without the use of ropes or harnesses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouldering

Re: On Car Seats as Contraception

#72

Post by nibbleshifter »

graywh wrote: post #14
samwillis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can have population growth and still solve the impending environmental disaster. On top of that, a declining human population results is an increasing young:old ratio. Fewer younger working age people supporting an increasingly older population. Socially and economically that will be a disaster, which will make solving ecological issues significantly harder.

> We can have population growth and still solve the impending environmental disaster. But will we?

Clearly not. We aren't going to solve it.

We probably will continue to expand though.

Re: On Car Seats as Contraception

#73

Post by legulere »

I propose an alternative: we should get our society more independent of cars. Physical activity by walking and cycling around instead of sitting all day also increases health and with it fertility.

Re: On Car Seats as Contraception

#74

Post by dragonwriter »

burlesona wrote: post #16

This resonates with me. It’s beyond tedious to get the kids in and out of the car seats all the time, and needing to buy a larger car to fit more than two kids gave me significant pause. We eventually decided to have more kids, and the positives far outweigh the negatives for us, but to this day the hassle of loading and unloading the car to go places is the single biggest negative experience of raising children. It…

> It’s beyond tedious to get the kids in and out of the car seats all the time

Car seats are a minor annoyance. With certain children, managing the headstrong children is time consuming around getting into and out of cars, but car seats themselves are easy.

Unless you are putting them in and and taking them out after every trip, but why would you do that?

Re: On Car Seats as Contraception

#75

Post by giantg2 »

golemotron wrote: post #68
giantg2 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trajectory to what exactly? I can't find anything about the sustainable carrying capacity, only the max which seems to be unsustainable based on current scenarios.

Trajectory toward a long, slow population collapse. It's hard to imagine what gets world population back up to replacement rate (2.1 children per woman) once it dips below. Children are expensive and technology makes having them far more optional than it ever has been in history. The world's population is aging out of its fertility years. Once we're below 2.1 the trajectory will be down, short of some severe cultural…

Perhaps the relatively short term pains of population collapse will be a net benefit in the long term - forcing economic systems and society to change in ways that support longer term stability with better quality of life.

Re: On Car Seats as Contraception

#76

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

giantg2 wrote: post #50
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I was a kid (not too long ago) I was riding without a booster seat well before age 8 and we'd occasionally ride with a friend's family in a station wagon or SUV with the add-on cargo seats. It wasn't unusual to occasionally ride in a pickup bed on private roads, or pile 8-9 people in the old Caprice for short ( This is a great example of literal survivorship bias

Yes, and so is the fact that we don't all ride rear facing, or that we have cars at all. The point is to draw a line somewhere that makes sense. The Overton window has been shifting an a rapidly increasing pace for child "safety" laws in the past two decades or so. If we make it an absolute about "Even one child", then we ignore promoting net benefit and can end up with detrimental effects, which is essentially the p…

I don't disagree there's some medium there, but I think we can both agree that despite the Overton window shifting we probably won't consider riding in the bed of a pickup acceptable child safety.

As I understand it the rear facing childseats are only required until the age of two. If you can only fit one in the back of your truck, doesn't that mean that really you just need to stagger out your children if you want to have multiple?

Re: On Car Seats as Contraception

#77

Post by benlivengood »

One could also argue that the U.S.'s lack of affordable high-quality mass transit reduces fertility. And probably by a lot more than having to use a car seat. Owning a car is roughly as expensive as raising one child for 18 years, especially if there's any consideration given to using newer cars with higher safety standards.

Cutting to the core of the article, though, is it any wonder that a hypercapitalist society doesn't prefer having children? There's no contract saying that children must contribute back to their parents in any economic way so they are a poor investment compared to bonds or stocks. A large fraction of children go to college (often at their parents' expense) and move out of the local community, newly minted economic units destined to enrich the already super-rich with their labor, which promises no tangible benefits to potential parents. The article touches on the lack of economic incentives for higher fertility but seems to treat it as more of an externality than a fundamental problem. Children used to be a capital investment and are now a cost center.

Re: On Car Seats as Contraception

#78

Post by dragonwriter »

whiddershins wrote: post #55
greesil wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's car seats that are affecting fertility, and definitely couldn't be the cost of raising a child. /s

You can provide a better quality of life than any child had 100 years ago, for very little money. So why exactly would money be the limiting factor?

> You can provide a better quality of life than any child had 100 years ago, for very little money. So why exactly would money be the limiting factor?

Because no one is setting their expectations (including child welfare agencies) on “what was practical 100 years ago”.

Re: On Car Seats as Contraception

#79

Post by forty »

burlesona wrote: post #16

This resonates with me. It’s beyond tedious to get the kids in and out of the car seats all the time, and needing to buy a larger car to fit more than two kids gave me significant pause. We eventually decided to have more kids, and the positives far outweigh the negatives for us, but to this day the hassle of loading and unloading the car to go places is the single biggest negative experience of raising children. It…

I don't know how old your kids are, but mine are 3 & 5 and they can seat and buckle on their own, so that extra time doesn't last for too long at least (seats are mostly annoying when I need to transfer the seats to another car and then back to mine)

Re: On Car Seats as Contraception

#80

Post by aporetics »

gruez wrote: post #71
aporetics wrote: post #65

I think rock climbing is the best thing ever. In the long run, the experience of rock climbing will spiritually reinvigorate the public. I want more people to rock climb. It’s the knots that are the problem. They take so long to tie, and every gym you go to makes you take tests to make sure you know how to tie them and then vocally double check that they are secure. Studies show that if people didn’t have to spend ti…

>We should remove any regulations around ropes and knots for rock climbing gyms so more people will rock climb. we already have that. >Bouldering is a form of free climbing that is performed on small rock formations or artificial rock walls without the use of ropes or harnesses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouldering

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusia
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