81–90 of 443 posts
I look at it a little differently. The urban cores in the USA are actively hostile places for anyone to be. You step outside your door...into an empty hallway of doors. You take an elevator or stairs down to a place with a few mailboxes, then step outside. Outside, you have a narrow strip of concrete, possibly with a few trees, that you are allowed to inhabit. Beyond it is as asphalt with two ton steel contraptions w…
I look at it a little differently. The urban cores in the USA are actively hostile places for anyone to be. You step outside your door...into an empty hallway of doors. You take an elevator or stairs down to a place with a few mailboxes, then step outside. Outside, you have a narrow strip of concrete, possibly with a few trees, that you are allowed to inhabit. Beyond it is as asphalt with two ton steel contraptions w…
I don't see how much different this is from suburbia, but with even more car intermediated isolation from other people? I hated suburbia as a child, since you were stuck in the house and needed your parents to get you to anywhere. With rural areas the isolation is even larger if your on a farm that is miles away from any other human beings. You have a nearby forest to explore, but that isn't exclusive to rural areas.…
when they get older, they develop more specific personalities/interests and they are likely to go to a larger school and make friends that live further away. when I was a kid, I lived basically right on the border between the city and the suburbs. all my friends lived just a little too far away to walk/bike to their houses, and the streets were busy enough that I doubt my parents would have let me anyway. any plans I made had to be convenient for my parents, and they tended to be pretty busy.
this is just my opinion, but I think "real life" doesn't really begin until you can move around the world on your own. for me, this wasn't until I got my license near the end of high school (which represents its own danger; teenagers are terrible drivers). I suspect my friends who grew up in the city, taking public transit to hang out with each other, had much richer teenage years than I did, maybe even safer.
Unpopular opinion I've held since before I became a parent: childless people should pay more taxes.
It might be worth considering that there are non-punitive ways to encourage having children - universal provision of child care seems to work. Carrots tend to be more popular than sticks.
Free childcare is why I don't think tax exemptions for parents actully work or are fair -- because low income people don't really benefit from it, the costs of raising children are pretty much fixed at a given age.
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You don't need "low rise cohousing communities" to have families in cities. Japanese cities are extremely dense, yet people raise families there just fine. On my trip to Japan, I was really struck by how many children I saw in the middles of cities (moreso in some districts than others, of course), whereas I never see children in downtown American cities. Of course, Japanese cities don't have enormous parking lots, e…
Japan has one of the lowest birthrates in the world, well below replacement rates. Their society is also consists almost entirely of Japanese that all share the same culture. It would be very hard to emulate what they do and even so, no real guarantee that it would change anything.
It’s not a complete reversal, but the fact that Japan’s rising birth rate has defied regional and global trends and persists despite continued urbanization and secularization shows they might be on to something.
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Yeah seriously. We're Catholic (the crazy kind who eschew birth control and have tons of babies). We live in the SF area and are moving to Portland and plan on buying in the city. We have lots of friends in SF who have large enough families (3 - 8 kids). These are not super wealthy people. Well, I mean, they save their money and spend wisely so they have enough. They are not hotshot doctors, lawyers, or software engi…
Not sure subjugating women to be home makers is going to win a lot support for your point. The problem is that there is no support in the U.S. for working couples who choose to move away from family for economic opportunity.
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As a Northern European it does seem a bit of a bad deal that women are expected to work but there isn't much of a guarantee for parental leave, affordable child care or even vacation. But I guess there isn't that much precedent for such things.
That expectation is rather cruel. For decades, women who make motherhood their "careers" have been looked down on as somehow inferior to women who pursue careers. Even the terminology used to describe such women is disparaging and loaded with shame and disappointment, as if the woman in question had chosen or had been forced to choose an inferior option. That she is in some sense a failure for prioritizing her childr…
I look at it a little differently. The urban cores in the USA are actively hostile places for anyone to be. You step outside your door...into an empty hallway of doors. You take an elevator or stairs down to a place with a few mailboxes, then step outside. Outside, you have a narrow strip of concrete, possibly with a few trees, that you are allowed to inhabit. Beyond it is as asphalt with two ton steel contraptions w…
I look at it a little differently. The urban cores in the USA are actively hostile places for anyone to be. You step outside your door...into an empty hallway of doors. You take an elevator or stairs down to a place with a few mailboxes, then step outside. Outside, you have a narrow strip of concrete, possibly with a few trees, that you are allowed to inhabit. Beyond it is as asphalt with two ton steel contraptions w…
So my moms parents had three children and my dads five. So not huge families but large. They grew up in a city in a third world country and frankly their childhood was a lot more dangerous than your imagined paranoia. Also your ideas of children are way off. We have a seven month old and we read to her, take her to the library, go to space talks, etc. Actually we do a lot more intellectual stuff now. My wife has take…
Minus the used needles and other debris that litter many of them. It’s a sad state that that’s the best place people with drug problems can go, but it seems they don’t have anywhere else to go.
It’s just not where I want to bring my kid to hangout.
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What's the purpose of keeping our current population steady? Is the goal just to never drop below a certain amount of people since we already reached that number? Is there some sort of universal duty to have a certain amount of people alive at the same time? And if so, is it based on any sort of science?
Maybe my english is not that great, but I thought I clearly exained that you will EVENTUALY need 2.X children per women, otherwise we will go extinct as a species, do you dispute that? Wether it's 20 years from now or 100 years it's irrelevant. Is there an universal duty to keep your weight constant at all times? No, loosing or gaining a couple of pounds is ok, but dieting by cutting of your hand is not ok.
For two, humanity has no innate value that makes maintaining infinite population growth somehow good or even sustainable. We're more likely to go extinct as a result of unsustainable population growth and resource exploitation than a result of reversing population growth globally.
And finally even if that was the case, this is something that would be literally hundreds of years away barring some sort of global extinction event.
See that column of "white college grad, no kids" -what do you think happens demographically to that column in 10/15 years time? Sure, some people move on. But, also, some people stay and have kids. Come back in 50 years and say if this was a glitch in a trend or not Demographics is sometimes a story which is only really told in hindsight.