521–530 of 533 posts
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You can make the same argument about food too: buying chicken at Costco is way cheaper per pound than in Whole Foods or Aldi. Are they also penalizing single people? No: buy more, pay less per unit.
You can’t freeze a hotel room.
I never would have understood this as a young, single person. Now that I have a family there are several times per year where we price out the cost of a solo ticket for one parent, the price of taking one or two kids, or the cost of all of us going for something. Having a quantity discount would absolutely tip the scales for us for certain trips. People will look at this as penalizing single travelers and want everyo…
We as a society already penalize people without families: 1. Higher taxes and fewer deductions 2. Higher workplace performance expectations 3. Higher costs in every aspect of life 4. Fewer options eat out, expensive solo tickets at events etc. This is just one more example in a long list of examples of how being by yourself is penalized in the society.
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For a society it's not philosophical. If it wishes to exist past a few decades then it needs children, simple as that. Therefore societies are (and should) be skewed towards that.
I'll ask this in response: why does society need to exist at all? Obviously ideas like yours are ingrained into us at a biological level and it logically makes sense if we want to survive as a species... but there is no inherent reason other than "just because" right?
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Yeah I used to think that until I had a family. In reality it's more like: 1. Taxes are more punishing because you're spending half your disposable income on children, and most of it probably comes from one earner. You can say "don't have children if you can't afford it" all you like, but you wouldn't be alive if nobody had children, so it's quite selfish of anyone to be anti-children. 2. For men performance expectat…
> you wouldn't be alive if nobody had children, so it's quite selfish of anyone to be anti-children. It gets into philosophical territory, but the default "having a pulse = good" thinking is pretty shortsighted IMO. Life is inherently suffering and no one got a yes/no prompt before being born.
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Is it possible to distinguish between society penalizing being single and society incentivizing having children? Since society's existence requires that people have children (even in the fairly short term, someone younger has to be around to take care of the older folks) it seems reasonable to incentivize it. I guess it's all relative, lower taxes for A compared to B looks like higher taxes for B compared to A, but I…
I think even calling it "society incentivizing people to have children" is a bit of a stretch, since in most cases the tax advantages are unlikely to result in a net financial advantage given the financial costs of raising children. In most cases the thought isn't "I'm ambivalent about having children but I will do it for the financial benefits" and rather "I'd like to have children, but it's very expensive, and the…
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We as a society already penalize people without families: 1. Higher taxes and fewer deductions 2. Higher workplace performance expectations 3. Higher costs in every aspect of life 4. Fewer options eat out, expensive solo tickets at events etc. This is just one more example in a long list of examples of how being by yourself is penalized in the society.
> Higher costs in every aspect of life ...except for the average $300,000 cost of raising a child in the US. That one would seem to rather balance out all those others.
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Speaking as a fat person, air travel is horrible and I'll happily drive a couple thousand miles to avoid flying. On a flight to Greenland I spent six hours smashed up between the window and a stranger (constant, sweaty, skin-on-skin contact) because they put three fat guys right next to each other on a full flight. I'd rather have taken a couple months of vacation and ridden the icebreaker in.
> they put three fat guys right next to each other Much better than subjecting someone who has made better life choices to the consequences of yours.
I don't particularly want to make life choices based on what's most economically efficient for airlines, but you do you I guess. And while my being fat is definitely a result of my life choices, that's certainly not the case for all of us.
Regardless of what size you believe everyone should be, the airlines have to deal with the size that people actually are. They have made the choice to size their seats in a way that causes this problem. They could have just plastered "no fatties" at the ticket counter, or maybe had a section of seats reserved for fat people at a somewhat higher price point and required people over a certain size to use them, but instead they've chosen to sit us all together. And they do so with the knowledge that judgemental assholes will just blame the fatties instead of them.
But keep playing their game, you appear to be good at it.
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> you wouldn't be alive if nobody had children, so it's quite selfish of anyone to be anti-children. It gets into philosophical territory, but the default "having a pulse = good" thinking is pretty shortsighted IMO. Life is inherently suffering and no one got a yes/no prompt before being born.
More like it gets into edgy teenager territory.
Yes, life can suck and I'm not saying we need to suicide as a species because of that. But, individuals can experience a much larger percentage of suffering than joy. So is it unreasonable to at least consider that possibility rather than going "haha you were brought into this world, suck it up and be happy"?
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> they put three fat guys right next to each other Much better than subjecting someone who has made better life choices to the consequences of yours.
Is it, though? I don't particularly want to make life choices based on what's most economically efficient for airlines, but you do you I guess. And while my being fat is definitely a result of my life choices, that's certainly not the case for all of us. Regardless of what size you believe everyone should be, the airlines have to deal with the size that people actually are. They have made the choice to size their sea…
> And while my being fat is definitely a result of my life choices, that's certainly not the case for all of us.
It literally is. No matter the genetic predisposition, you need a caloric surplus to get fat.
> They could have just plastered "no fatties" at the ticket counter, or maybe had a section of seats reserved for fat people at a somewhat higher price point and required people over a certain size to use them, but instead they've chosen to sit us all together.
They do provide bigger seats at a higher price point though. You have chosen not to make use of them and then blame the airline. If you are big enough that sitting next to someone your own size causes you discomfort then you would be encroaching the space of someone smaller sitting next to you. That wouldn't be fair to them.