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The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

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Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#681

Post by montroser »

somenameforme wrote: post #516
kraig911 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just hard now. Before I had kids I had a network of friends and had a great social life. Now it's just me and my wife. If I want more friends I'll have to have more kids I guess? I have 4 now. One (my first) is severely autistic. Financially the cost? I pay about 6,000 a month in daycare. 2k a month in healthcare expenses. Then community wise. Every time I've gone to take them to the movies, or to a restaurant o…

When I read things like this I find it confusing in so many ways. I've been out of the US for a while now so perhaps there's some contemporary issues I'm just not considering? For $6k a month, why not hire a private nanny? You could also work with other parents in your area to setup something for a bit more socializing depending on their age. Similarly, I find it practically impossible not to meet people literally ev…

Say you hire a nanny for $6k/mo... What problem have you solved? You're still paying the six grand, and you had better hope the nanny is good, because that is your kids' whole world now for a chunk of their existence.

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#682

Post by fulafel »

kingkawn wrote: post #288

Mass human behavior in regards to fertility, climate destruction, and social decay is much more sensical if you frame it as species-wide suicidality.

Suicidality seems rather overdramatic. It'd take a lot of halvings of the population to reach species viability threshold.

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#683

Post by GorbachevyChase »

throwawayohio wrote: post #85

Living in a city that this administration has constantly been attacking forced me and my wife, as well as many of our neighbors, to put off our family growth plans. Not only did many of my neighbors lose their jobs, but others are simply fearful of living their lives. We're fine financially, have housing, etc, but at this point why would we go through the stress of raising a child when a masked federal agent might ju…

It’s nothing short of miraculous that medieval families raised their own children without cheap, brown labor to do all of the actual child raising.

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#684

Post by jedberg »

Balgair wrote: post #610
jedberg wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not entirely. Sperm counts in young men have been falling for decades. No one is sure why.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/declining-sperm-count-much-... Per the above, it seems that the change in spermcount worldwide seems to be flat.

Interesting. That page shows some pretty strong evidence that the prevailing thinking is incorrect. Will have to look more.

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#685

Post by program_whiz »

lostlogin wrote: post #580
kraig911 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just hard now. Before I had kids I had a network of friends and had a great social life. Now it's just me and my wife. If I want more friends I'll have to have more kids I guess? I have 4 now. One (my first) is severely autistic. Financially the cost? I pay about 6,000 a month in daycare. 2k a month in healthcare expenses. Then community wise. Every time I've gone to take them to the movies, or to a restaurant o…

> Don't get me start on dog/cat people who equate their struggles to mine... or people who have no idea how hard life is already for a kid who is disabled. I’d never have believed this until it happened to me.

Yep, but people can only understand the stresses and challenges they have faced, its very hard to understand something you haven't experienced. Even if you try to imagine it, you really can't understand it until you're living it. But yeah, after kids I think any rational parent would instantly without question abandon or sacrifice a pet for a child. A pet is literally 0 out of 10 compared to a child -- no comparison whatsoever. But I appreciate the "I have a cat" people are at least trying to relate. But its a bit like when my plumber came over and tried to tell me how he's really into programming because he's dabbled in a bit of HTML on his drag and drop website. I was friendly and appreciated relating to it, but he's only grazed the surface. I'm sure in his circles he's the "computer wiz".

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#686

Post by OkayPhysicist »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #478
mattmaroon wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is almost certainly the reason why they are making such a spectacle of it. Self deportation is the goal.

The goal is to rile the base and distract from the fact that there is no improvement in cost of living, healthcare, education, etc... tourism is down, farmers are losing their farms en masse, etc... It was trans people yesterday, Somalians today, and it will be someone else tomorrow. If that wasn't bad enough, it's clear the president and other powerful men (of both parties) were engaged in an international child sex…

It's not "a distraction". It's serving their constituents. No good people support the Republicans, their primary voter base are just a bunch of hopped-up xenophobes who hate people who aren't like them because they've never met anybody who isn't from their inbred town.

If anything, from a democracy angle it's almost admirable how committed to answering the demands of their base the Right is in America. Pedophile billionaires get their desires met, racist yokels from flyover states get their dreams delivered, the war hawks, all of them.

We need to stop deluding ourselves into thinking "oh, the constituency on the right would be horrified if they just knew better". They wouldn't be them if they knew better. They are simply worse people, and the actions of the government are directly appealing to their worst desires.

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#687

Post by jedberg »

alt227 wrote: post #586
gorfian_robot wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is the issue. the US was easily addressing this problem with immigration before the current regime

Surely that meant that the problem was increasing in the coutries they came from?

Not necessarily. Those countries have enough growth to sustain both their population and ours.

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#688

Post by shipman05 »

worik wrote: post #636
echelon wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that being a parent is harder - it's actually easier (excluding the post-WWII American boom years which were a fluke). It's that the floor of being single has risen to stratospheric highs. Being single used to be: boring (no internet, tv, constant dopamine drip. Having kids was an escape from mundane boredom.) Being single used to be: lonely (now we have dating and hookup apps, online games, tons of in-perso…

> post-WWII American boom years which were a fluke No fluke. A deliberate policy

There's certainly some flukiness to being the only major country on the planet that hadn't been shelled and bombed to smithereens in the preceding decades. That's not the whole story, but it's certainly part of it.

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#689

Post by mamonster »

dv_dt wrote: post #609
mamonster wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horrible fiscal ticking time bomb that ignores the fact that regularization means naturalization over the next 10-15 years and so access to EU healthcare system. The biggest drag on government budgets in EU are socialized healthcare and retirement costs. At this point we know healthcare costs are severely backloaded, with most spending coming out of the last 10 years of someone's life. Regularizing now allows them to…

The latter half of careers, and certainly 30-55 is generally the period of highest productivity of working careers. Its even higher value for the economy when wages do a catch up slowly over their time. I think it is politiczed fear mongering to suggest that the economic balance is negative in that kind of exchange.

>The latter half of careers, and certainly 30-55 is generally the period of highest productivity of working careers.

For illegal immigrants though? They are not regularized to the C-suite but to Uber Eats and construction work.

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#690

Post by dude250711 »

jimt1234 wrote: post #493

I've said it before on HN, but it's worth repeating: When my parents started a family in the late-60's, my dad had only a high school diploma, yet he supported his wife, 2 kids, 2 cars, and a brand new house. Heck, one of their cars was a 1964 convertible Corvette (my mom still talks about how much she misses that car). That is basically unheard-of these days.

How many other people did your parents independently date before settling down with each other if you do not mind me asking?
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