131–140 of 494 posts
For pete sake, don't break up the flow and over-complicate your very first sentence with irrelevant asides like this: > A friend and I were talking about our families today when I realized that my grandmother (this grandmother) became a grandma (not my grandma) at 45. I got confused and distracted trying to solve the riddle of why his "grandmother" was not his "grandma" [0] when it had nothing to do with the point he…
I (and I'm sure others) call this the idiocracy bias. While your friends are mulling over the ideal age and economic circumstances to have children, there are plenty of other families not thinking about this. They're having kids in their late teens and early twenties. That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy future, but it explains this blog post.
> That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy future, but it explains this blog post. We're already living in the idiocracy future. Actually, the film needs a sequel something fierce, smartphones and now AI is fast making our reality post-idiocracy.
> this source for example claims global life expectancy jumped from around 47 to 72 from 1950 to 2022 I believe this is because of reductions in child mortality more than increases in adult lifespan. So it doesn't affect the number of great grandmothers that much. Having kids older is definitely a big change for society and individual families, though. Every day as a parent I wish I was 15 years younger and my parent…
Yeah, the thing that kinda annoyed me about the article is that it even acknowledges this fact ("even though life expectancy at birth as I’ve used here isn’t the best proxy for this"), but then for some reason refuses to make the next rational leap that there were plenty of great grandmothers in previous generations, totally invalidating the article's main thesis. Obviously there have been huge changes in family size…
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Absolutely, but for some reason pointing this out is considered massively classist in some quarters. I don't really think it's classist to say that if people who don't value science, think climate change is fake, fear outsiders, etc. have 6 kids, and people who hold different have 1 or none, it will have a large impact on public policy in a generation.
Isn't it wildly classist to so patly assume that attitudes are that transmissible? My great grandfather had like 10 siblings and worked on a farm. What's that tell you about me?
The industrial revolution shook things up.
If you haven't read the article, it's about how people having kids later means you won't meet your great grandparents. My mom had me when she was 23, and her mom had her at 22. I'm in my forties and still have two living grandparents, and am very grateful for them. I remember a lot of days where my grandmother watched me and my sister, and she was able to do that because she was only in her late 40's herself and plen…
I got fairly unlucky in the great grandparent department. My grandmother had my mom at 15, and my mom had me at 19, and all my great grandparents were already dead!
https://hmmdaily.com/2018/10/18/your-real-biological-clock-i...
> If you intend to have children, but you don’t intend to have them just yet, you are not banking extra years as a person who is still too young to have children. You are subtracting years from the time you will share the world with your children.
If you haven't read the article, it's about how people having kids later means you won't meet your great grandparents. My mom had me when she was 23, and her mom had her at 22. I'm in my forties and still have two living grandparents, and am very grateful for them. I remember a lot of days where my grandmother watched me and my sister, and she was able to do that because she was only in her late 40's herself and plen…
Mom had me at 21 (dad was 30). I knew both my grandmothers and neither of my grandfathers. One was left behind when my mom's family immigrated. The other died not too long after my dad's family immigrated - just before my dad was born
I had my son (now 4) when I was 41. Both his grandmothers are around, and neither of his grandfathers. My dad died last year and my son barely remembers him. My wife's dad died when she was two.
I'm glad to say my son and my mother are very close - they spend every other weekend together. His other grandmother and my wife aren't close and so my son doesn't know her very well.
Not sure if there's much here - except to say that having kids in our thirties should still be young enough that healthy grandparents can be around for the formative years. And regardless of age, life happens, and a multi-generational family unit isn't guaranteed.
For pete sake, don't break up the flow and over-complicate your very first sentence with irrelevant asides like this: > A friend and I were talking about our families today when I realized that my grandmother (this grandmother) became a grandma (not my grandma) at 45. I got confused and distracted trying to solve the riddle of why his "grandmother" was not his "grandma" [0] when it had nothing to do with the point he…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You see, the thing is, it's deeply classist. It's also misplaced outrage. The poors have been doing this for millenia and we still have a society that progresses rapidly and much of the heavy lifting that moves us forward is done by folks you and others here are denigrating. If they believe the things you disparage it's because the governments and systems that the "smart" and wealthy have created have utterly failed…
> If they believe the things you disparage it's because the governments and systems that the "smart" and wealthy have created have utterly failed at getting those people educated and involved. I think the issue is that there are two groups of smart & wealthy people. There's a mid-level of people who are happy to have more than they need and don't have the Machiavellian drive to extract every last ounce of money and p…
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And how should we measure that?
There are literally hundreds of ways to slice population statistics other than just primary occupation. Practically any of those, maybe! Do you find your primary occupation entirely defines every aspect of yourself?
The thing with statistics, is that you have to gather data which have some consistency before you apply any statistics tool and try to draw some conclusions.
We can agree that any individual is more than the indefinitely various number of categories under which we can label this individual, but at the end of the day there only a limited amount of data we actually really have on any person that ever existed, and even less consistent set of data other many people under any category we can think of.