It is a bit of a leap, but quite possibly an oblique reference to Voltaire's Candide. He spent some time dismantling the idea that this was the best of all possible worlds (the phrase apparently started with Leibniz) and the Lisbon earthquake featured prominently.
Yeah but their strategy on that seems kinda dumb to me because it either does nothing or has a negative effect on the ecosystem. If someone wants to mine bitcoin on their own CPU they can, and if my PC has enough hash power to find a coin on a blockchain then let me tell you, that chain has real problems and is not a serious player. That amount of computing power doesn't justify paying any interesting amount of money.
It isn't the biggest technical concern and at least they have principles, but I expect something that looks like Monero + easy to mine will eventually appear and turn out to have an advantage in the real world. Although it is hard to predict because it isn't completely clear what (if any) impact the algorithm difficulty has in practice. But if there are big datacentre mining a cryptocurrency with dedicated hardware then that means there are people with skin in the game who want it to succeed. Seems like a better equilibrium than whatever the Monero people are aiming for.
> Like Monero but easy to mine is Monero. A Monero mining ASIC is called a CPU, by design.
That is the "does nothing" argument. But compared to Bitcoin, having a general-purpose [0] ASIC seems like it'd make the network less secure - if someone wants to run something like a 51% attack against Bitcoin they first have to buy a ridiculous amount of specialist Bitcoin-only hardware that will potentially lose all its value after a successful attack. Also probably be a lot easier to track who did it.
Monero the equilibriums are less obvious. Does that matter? No, I don't think so, I still own a certain amount. But it isn't a helpful axis to experiment on and I don't see where the upside is meant to come from vs just going with sha.
The article is exploring a broad topic but one area that seems to be overlooked is governments making privacy illegal or actively working to undermine it. The major privacy risk right now is things like social media age verification laws which, in principle, probably make pseudonymous sites like HN illegal or on the path to being illegal in many jurisdictions.
It is hard to maintain privacy when a law enforcement body insists that it isn't allowed. There are also indications that companies quickly become too enmeshed with intelligence services to be able to create properly private options even if tactically they might have an interest. Companies like Telegram stand out as looking difficult to run in practice because of the pressure from various snoops.
If it is legal to create private options then they will always exist because the people who care about specific aspects of privacy can self-serve.
> The point being: humans seem to me to be the weak link here.
I tend to agree but it is hard to shake the feeling that there is a larger system in play that the humans are just a component of. And that system is making the decisions.
Historically that whole thought was just a philosophical curio because the decision making parts of the system had to be powered by humans. But what we're discovering as AI improves is either we've hit AGI or humans are actually incapable of performing any act that demonstrates intelligence or autonomy.
As we build systems where the drive and decision making stems from computers, it does seem that we will have to revisit the concept of humans being the problem.
"I tend to agree but it is hard to shake the feeling that there is a larger system in play that the humans are just a component of. And that system is making the decisions."
That system is "the economy". Which, clearly, doesn't have humanity's best interests in mind.
> The double standards are evident when we consider that all of this would sound ludicrous if aimed at a man who had been proclaimed king...
I don't know about that, the quoted criticisms sound a lot like those that would be levelled at a king too. The issue is more that nobody expects a man to care, even a little bit, if someone accuses him of being crude and arbitrary in his search for power. Obviously it is gendered, but the actual complaints are generic. Anyone with serious power has to bat through things like that.
I can give an example by swapping in Trump. The criticism holds up with a gender swap, adjusted for the fact that by default we expect a man to be in the office so it isn't explicitly gendered. This sounds like stock criticism of him that might turn up in any political conversation.
[Donald Trump] at once put on an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to --the gentle sex-- [his office], began to walk and speak and do all things more stiffly and haughtily than [he] had been wont … [he] arranged everything as [he himself] thought fit and according to [his] own arbitrary will.
No, the gender role stuff is absolutely critical and you can't just handwave it away. Married women couldn't own their own property independently in England until 1870.
In particular, the belief that a married woman had no agency separate from her husband, who would then be de facto king, continued all the way up to Elisabeth II. Much reduced and not ultimately a problem, but it was still discussed at the time of her coronation.
What is more interesting in all this is the reminder of the succession crisis. Monarchy is "supposed to" reduce chaotic power struggles like this by making it unambiguous, but quite often the English succession was disputed or passed down through a second degree relationship.
It's not a handwave - the article doesn't offer anything to handwave away. The article says that she was offered specifically gendered criticism, then quotes generic criticism.
I'm sure being a woman counted against her, bit if the article is going to put up a quote as evidence of sexism then it shouldn't be a passage that can be realistically adapted to any politician ever. If the article had a passage that says "we can't let this woman be king, she can't even own property!" that would be different. But the quote in the article doesn't sound ludicrous when applied to a man. It sounds like something that is routinely said of men in positions of power.
It could even keep the superficial gendering if you wanted it to, there is a lot of argument that men in positions of power should be exhibiting positive masculine bearing (stoicism, accountability, honour, etc, etc) that politicians routinely fail at to great public outcry.
I’m struggling to follow your point. The article isn’t giving a major thesis on why medieval people thought Matilda couldn’t rule England. From the perspective of the barons at the time, Matilda couldn’t be queen in her own right because women can’t rule. They didn’t think any deeper than that.
My point is the article claimed it would show evidence of something when in fact it did not. It should either not have bothered to include evidence or found better evidence
Er… no it didn’t? It just said the criticism being based on her womanhood was evident because of <reason>, it never promised to prove it, it was just a rhetorical device and they expect the reader to know the information already.
If you want to learn more about early medieval attitudes to women and power in England, it’s on you to learn, not on the article to triple its length to prove every minor claim.
> not on the article to triple its length to prove every minor claim.
Yes but that is my point. They're making the article longer by including evidence that undermines its claims. They should have either made the claim and let it stand without evidence, or they should have aligned what they said to the evidence they felt was worth including.
If they're going to claim gendered criticism then hold up generic criticism as the best example of criticism it confuses the picture. Assuming that there was gendered criticism happening somewhere off to the side out of sight, was that the decisive criticism? Or was it the criticisms that the article writer felt were important enough to include in the article?
Because the impression the article is giving is that people weren't complaining about her gender, but the fact she was behaving arbitrarily and arrogantly. That is good reason not to put a man in charge too - if you see a man acting arbitrarily and arrogantly it is also a mistake to put him in charge of anything and he would be criticised for it. I do that all the time, there are a lot of unprincipled men in politics who should be called out for their hubris. And they are.
Now it may be that what she was doing wouldn't be considered arrogance and hubris in a man (we don't know exactly because the article is short) but "double standards" and "sound ludicrous if aimed at a man" are simply not true. We hold men to the same standard and make the same criticisms of them.
The substance of your objection is “these criticisms are regularly levelled at men today,” and you skip the part that 900 years have passed since they were levelled at Matilda. You then demand the article provide evidence to overcome this comparison you have been 12th century norms and 21st century norms? Really?
Let me repeat: this is not intended as a thesis. It’s a small historical tale to explain the background of a period of time in early mediaeval England. It assumes you know how women were viewed during that time period and the example provides flavour. If you want to contradict its claims, just post the articles that shows differently.
That's not sexist though, it is just equivalent to noting she's a woman (like calling her "her" and "she") because we can reasonably offer the same criticism about a man. A man can have an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the controlled gait and bearing proper to the stronger sex. And adjusting for language drift people do make that sort of complaint of men, I remember one criticism of Biden being that he walked in a frail way and fell over a lot - literally complaints about his gait and bearing giving a bad impression. Not a very strong criticism but he was male and it was made.
We might reasonably infer that she got called arrogant for doing something that wouldn't be considered arrogance in a man, the article has unhelpfully elided that detail (maybe the original author did as well). But we've also got to admit she might have actually been unusually arrogant, that does happen from time to time. If I were in charge of a military I'd be standing around even more arrogant than I already am.
pjc50 offered a good example of something that was actually gendered - women not being able to own property in their own right for whatever unfair reason. The quote isn't that sort of out-and-obvious sexism. Said quote could almost be modern political whinging.
PS I'll add in an acknowledgement that words did mean different things back then so possibly at the time the only reasonable reading was with an "[as with all women]" on the end, but the fact is that as written this quote is making specific accusations of arrogance and arbitraryness that are not contained to either gender and are bad in all leaders, female or otherwise. He didn't write "women are all arrogant" or "women are all arbitrary". If anything the thrust of the quote is most women weren't either of those things. It doesn't support the idea of double standards or ludicrous criticism that would never be made of a man.
Ok, I suppose I understand but I really do not agree. Modern criticism of the US president is so far removed from medieval criticism of a female monarch as to be nearly irrelevant.
To address your question, though, yes I absolutely read "proper to the gentler sex" to be a statement about how Queen Mathilda _ought_ to have behaved. Also I have strong doubts that men (especially male rulers) at the time would have had the same standard set for arrogance. Of course a King could be in fact arrogant and then critics might point that out, but I do not see why they would bring his sex into it.
One thing we might agree on is that all political criticism can be false, and whether or not she was _actually_ arrogant is difficult to say. In the context of a bitter civil war, any record of events will have the strong bias of the author. The modern world did not invent fake news.
Arguing that a criticism focusing on her behaviour allegedly not being "proper to her sex" isn't gendered whilst handwaving away all the well established historical context about how women were treated to invent new context where she deserved everything she got is bold, I'll give you that...
Is is true that they believed women couldn’t rule? England was not the first European country to have a female monarch. By the time all this was going on there had been a female monarch elsewhere in Europe a few decades earlier.
Would be interesting if there were any texts at the time discussing this.
I’m asking out of genuine curiosity not to start an argument.
I do think it’s fair to point out that both of these postage Matilda by a few hundred years. I’m actually struggling to think of many Christian European kingdoms that would have at this point.
France only had kings at that point (in fact, Matilda’s son Henry II’s marriage to Eleanor of Acquitaine comes about because she didn’t give the king of France a son!)
Germany (HRE) selected their emperor so didn’t have succession problems in that sense.
Italy was a collection of city states, Naples was yet to form a kingdom.
Maybe Poland had an earlier queen? But then I don’t know if English nobles paid much attention to Poland, to be honest!
it seems like the rest of the world (India, China, Thailand, Egypt, ...) had female monarchs of various sorts ('queen regnant' seems like a relevant terminology here, I'm not sure).
The closest ones to Europe (discounting ancient Egypt?) might be:
So there were some texts later discussing the problems of Elizabeth I being Queen Regnant when all laws and customs referred to a “King.” We also see a lot of her father’s behaviour (Henry VIII) being driven by his need for a male heir. It’s why he tries to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
Further, there were specific reasons why Elizabeth I was treated differently to her father. For example, Henry VIII used to meet with counsellors when he woke up in the morning, still in bed. For obvious reasons, this was not done when his daughter reigned.
I don't think that's why it's called a "Privy Council". Just because the only meaning for privy that you know, today, is a toilet, does not mean that the word in another context means toilet, any more than the fact you know the verb "do" in English can be slang for sexual intercourse means that when Marlo says "Do it or don't" in The Wire he means for his soldiers to have sex. He's indicating that he doesn't care whether they murder Bubbles.
"Privy" more generally means private or personal, which explains its use for a group which advises specifically the monarch alone.
> According to the Oxford dictionary the definition of the word "privy" in Privy Council is an obsolete one meaning "Of or pertaining exclusively to a particular person or persons; one's own",[3] insofar as the council is personal to the sovereign.
A whataboutism that makes a legitimate point. It isn't reasonable to dismiss something just because a person makes a comparison. It's valid to consider that Apple might have been applying inconsistent standards and unfairly targeting Zoom for some reason.
I doubt they were being unfair but it is a bad practice to dismiss an argument because someone has the temerity to expect consistent standards. The threat of Apple arbitrarily removing apps based on unreliable reasoning is concerning.
> It absolutely is. Similar to the way banks create money [1]. The commitments support credit that wouldn't exist without it.
Making a loan/offering credit isn't automatically money creation - the amount of money in the system before and after the loan might be the same. Haven't been following Nvidia all that closely, but it seems a little bit unlikely that they're a commercial bank. Financial chicanery they may be doing but offering deposit accounts would be new territory. The loan has to be made in a very particular way for it to be money creation (notably, in a way that creates new money), and it should be illegal for most people to do that otherwise we'd all be printing our own money instead of the printing being directed to wealthy asset owners first and foremost.
> Making a loan/offering credit isn't automatically money creation
The Fed can limitlessly increase monetary base (MB) to increase M1. Non-bank lenders create M4 which turns into M2 through the money markets which turns into M1 through the banks. More convoluted and more limited, by design. But the net effect is the same–more M1.
More broadly: when you open a bar tab, you're literally creating money, even if it never hits M1.
Credit is always money creation. When it's done at scale it's almost always creating M1.
No, its not! Its a swap on the active/left side of the balance sheet: If my mum borrows me 1 USD for icecream, she did not create money, instead she swapped her positions in her assets/left side of her balance sheet.
If we attempted to pay our taxes by creating this new money, do you think we would succeed? Because I suspect that when we get to the tax office we will discover that what you're calling money is not actually money in the practical sense.
Or I suppose I should spend more time with an open bar tab come tax time.
The monetary aggregates are things that are theoretically equivalent to creating money, but I'm going to challenge whether it is proper to compare M4 activity to the fed balance sheet. One of those entities is involved in actual money creation. One of them is hyper-privileged money creation that is more impactful and less comparable to other forms.
> If we attempted to pay our taxes by creating this new money, do you think we would succeed?
Yes.
Nvidia issues a commitment to a firm that lets an SPV raise money. Some of that is just M1 being transferred from one account to another. A lot, however, will be created through loans (new M1), commercial paper (new M3) and the like. Some of that will be pledged as collateral. On the other side of the equation, when the SPV signs e.g. a construction contract, you'll have builders taking out bank loans and issuing commercial paper, et cetera.
You can pay your taxes out of a checking account using money a bank created out of thin air that morning that the Fed won't even learn about until the evening.
> monetary aggregates are things that are theoretically equivalent to creating money, but I'm going to challenge whether it is proper to compare M4 activity to the fed balance sheet
You're absolutely correct in M4 being unequal to the monetary base and deposits at the Federal Reserve. But the moment you say the Fed balance sheet, you're conflating two things. The Fed has lent, in the past, against non-Treasury collateral (most famoulsy, mortgage bonds).
And if we're talking about money in relation to the real economy, you can't spend reserves at the Fed. There is debate on what the most "real" money is, but pretty much everyone agrees that a deposit in a checking account is more relevant to the economy than unspendable reserves at the Fed.
How? And what is your theory why people pay taxes from their labour earnings instead of just creating new money to pay Just-In-Time?
> A lot, however, will be created through loans (new M1)
Isn't M1 is currency and overnight deposits? I'm pretty sure you're just making things up here; it sounds highly illegal for Nvidia to create new M1. Unless they've taken out a banking license when I wasn't looking.
> You can pay your taxes out of a checking account using money a bank created out of thin air that morning that the Fed won't even learn about until the evening.
...from a checking account. Banks thoughtlessly lend against investment-grade commercial paper. The kind the SPVs Nvidia is commiting to are borrowing with. Nvidia's promises are creating debt that money markets and banks transmit into M1.
Note that the Fed doesn't directly create M1. It moderates it through the interbank lending market to manipulate the monetary base, M0 plus deposits at the Fed. That, in turn, influences banks' lending patterns which is what manipulates M1 and MZM. Underwriting M4 to drive up collateral that in turn increases M1 is the same mechanism, different channel.
> what is your theory why people pay taxes from their labour earnings instead of just creating new money to pay Just-In-Time?
I'm not Nvidia. I did just sign a purchase order with a builder for my deck that their local bank called me to confirm before issuing a loan that will appear as new money in their checking account. My signature, in that case, enabled the bank to create a tiny amount of money. It's not monetarily significant, however, because my deck isn't that fancy.
At the end of the day, all credit is money. If you can create credit, you can create money. Most of us can't, at least not in significant quantities.
> Isn't M1 is currency and overnight deposits?
M0 + demand deposits at commercial banks, yes.
> sounds highly illegal for Nvidia to create new M1
Nvidia causes the creation of new M1 through banks. Nvidia's commitments directly create money of a quantifiable amount that wouldn't have existed if Huang hadn't flicked his pen.
> unless they've taken out a banking license
Fun fact, you don't need a banking license to issue traveler's checks. And traveler's checks are counted in M1 in the U.S.
> pretty sure you're just making things up here
If that's your reaction to encountering new information, godspeed.
We've got Schrodinger's money here! One minute I can go down to the bar and create as much money as I like with the bartender. Then the next we suddenly discover that yes we need a bank and yes there all of a sudden a checking account is involved and no a bar tab isn't a legally recognised form of money.
> I'm not Nvidia. I did just sign a purchase order with a builder...
Again though, we discover that in fact the person in control of the part where the actual money was created was a bank. You can't just head off with your builder and create money - otherwise you'd be stupid to stop until you unseat whoever was the richest fellow in the world this morning.
> Nvidia causes the creation of new M1 through banks.
And the banks make another appearance!
---
I put it to you that Nvidia can't, in fact, create new money. You'd never get that line of argument past a tax collector.
> Fun fact, you don't need a banking license to issue traveler's checks. And traveler's checks are counted in M1 in the U.S.
And I'll add in postcript that I know nothing about travellers checks in the US, but I'm quietly confident it'd turn out to be illegal to go around creating vast amounts of new money there too, on the basis that people tend to work for a living.
> Nestled in the lush green mountains of Central Mexico, next to a sparsely traveled gravel road...
The economics of this are deliciously surreal and in many ways slightly romantic. You have this dingy little shack-like construction out in the "lush green mountains", run by these lunatics of a Mexican persuasion, coordinating billions of dollars of international financial data in a reliable high-trust manner. I encourage everyone to look at the photo in the article and imagine a fat dude in a singlet sleeping on a hammock because that seems to be the vibe of the place.
This is a real case of the truth being stranger than fiction. If I were reading about this sort of thing in a novel in the pre-crypto era it'd be a big building in a city or something. Maybe some dudes in suits. Sealed roads.
Turns out it's going to be closer to an unwashed hermit sitting in their mountain cave spending the days meditating, fighting off snakes and tending to the server racks. Voila, high finance.
This type of thing always strikes me. I remember as a kid thinking that it was weird in Star Wars that people are living in the desert with draft animals and primitive conditions, while there are literal interstellar spaceships.
But… at the end of the day tech is just tooling. Your crypto money laundering information could well be in a building that once housed a donkey with some sort of keeper checking the blinking lights.
How do you expect their material conditions to improve if nobody attempts to get more stuff to them?
I doubt the "HN crowd" was about to do anything, but it'd be better if someone saw some sort of market opportunity here. It sounds pretty miserable not being able to get to a well paid job. I personally appreciate all the people who lent me money and sold me cars. It enabled a lot of income for me, over a lifetime.
Vote for people who will drop tariffs and allow the import of cheap EVs manufactured at scale.
US automakers have chosen to abandon anything not a $40k-$100k SUV or pickup truck, and purposely minimize production to optimize for profits over volume. You can either leave the country, pay the captive market tax, or import a cheap car when allowed to.
Chinese automakers cannot find enough marine capacity for exports at the moment (currently at a ~12M unit/year export run rate). Imports are allowed eventually imho, it’s just a matter of when (elections and representation turnover rate). Until then, the poor are held hostage for profits (as is tradition in the US).
In the long term, yes, but infrastructure projects are famously drawn out in the US due to meddling from NIMBYs, companies puppeting sham environmental groups, and third parties forcing their way in and holding projects hostage unless they get a slice of the pie among other things.
It’s a battle worth fighting but public transport infrastructure isn’t going to happen overnight and people will need cars that won’t bankrupt them until then.
The advantage of busses and bikes are that they can use the same roads we already built for cars. We don't need to build new infrastructure to make busses and bikes much better, we just need to limit car access. That can be done by significantly lowering speed limits for private vehicles, tolling a lot more roads and streets, and in cases where we can (especially in cities) ban personal vehicles entirely.
Trains need infrastructure, but a lot of the train infrastructure is already there, it just needs to be repaired and modernized. The USA freight network is one of the most comprehensive train networks in the world. The problem is that is has gone through decades of neglect, and trains are required to crawl through a large portion of the network so as to not derail. Urgent modernization of the rail network could happen in years instead of decades.
The things you’re describing aren’t “alternatives to driving.” They perform a different function. Most Americans don’t aspire to live like Chinese people packed into high rises with 0.8 kids taking the train to work. They want to live where they want to live, then take their 2-3 kids to school and themselves to work 10-15 miles away without having to plan their lives around a public transit schedule.
I'm American, and I don't normally drive, because I use busses, bikes, and trains to get to my destinations. I sold my last (hopefully ever) car over a year ago.
I'm sorry to shatter the dreams of most Americans, but the world has finite resources. Buying a car when you're poor is hard, because cars are expensive, because they are extremely resource demanding. Even with all the subsidies drivers receive, they still usually struggle with the cost.
By the way, you don't have to look at public transit schedules when your public transit works. I recommend visiting countries outside the US that have functional infrastructure.
You might consider it obvious that the personal car is more resource-demanding than the alternatives, but I don't, particularly in a country with as low a population density as the US.
> By the way, you don't have to look at public transit schedules when your public transit works. I recommend visiting countries outside the US that have functional infrastructure.
I go to Japan once or twice a year. Even in Japan, many people take regional rail or (gasp!) busses, and those don't run every 5 minutes.
A majority of American households (58.4%) are childless and ~80% of Americans live in urban areas per the US Census Bureau. I think you might be misreading the desires of most Americans, based on the data.
I agree Americans love their cars, but will they love them with oil prices above $100-$120/barrel persistently? To be determined.
> Personal preference plays a significant role in changing attitudes toward parenthood. Among Americans under 50 without children, 57% said they simply didn’t want kids, while 44% preferred to focus on other priorities. Financial concerns also weighed heavily, with 36% citing the cost of raising children—three times the rate among childless people over 50.
> According to the 2020–2024 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, approximately 286 million Americans (roughly 94 percent of the population) live in metropolitan statistical areas. Just 17.7 million people, about 6 percent, live entirely outside any metro or micropolitan area.
> The popular image of America as a land of small towns and open plains is, statistically speaking, a minority experience. The story of 21st-century America is, above all, a story of cities.
>Among Americans under 50 without children, 57% said they simply didn’t want kids
Your 57% lacks relevance to the current conversation because it is 57% of a small
percentage of Americans.
42 to 43% of Americans are either under 18 or a parent of an under-18-yo. Plus of course some outside that group will soon become parents. And some are empty-nesters who prefer to keep on living in the neighborhood they lived in when they were raising their children.
A growing gap between how many kids people want and how many they have militates against copying the dense housing patterns of Asian countries that have the lowest birth rates in the world.
Desired fertility is like desired Lambos, all that matters is realized fertility. And realized fertility is trending lower globally, as shown by my numerous citations. I’m willing to bet on this if you want, as a demographic scholar.
> Desired fertility is like desired Lambos, all that matters is realized fertility.
Sure, people are having less kids because we banned building housing and then filled the housing we have with government subsidized illegal immigrants. What’s your point?
People are having less kids because women didn’t want them before, they just have the power to not have them now. This is covered extensively in the citations I provided in the comment you replied to. Housing might be a component, but it is not the root cause. Children are a luxury good now, not an extra hand on the farm.
~40% of annual pregnancies in both the US and internationally are unintended (per the Guttmacher Institute and the UN, respectively), so even with fertility rates down in teens and the 21-40 cohort, we still have a long way to go in preventing unwanted pregnancies and children (which translates into a further declining fertility rate curve forward looking, model accordingly).
I assist thousands of folks a year seeking permanent birth control obtain it, mostly the childfree but occasionally someone who already has a kid or two, ama; this is the cheapest, easiest win as it relates to avoiding suffering around unwanted children, and the emotional, time, and monetary costs of unwanted children at scale is simply too high. The historical total fertility rate was because women were not educated and empowered; forward looking fertility rate is the true neutral rate.
You’re overlooking the Gallup studies showing that the desired fertility rate has been stable at 2.7, well above the replacement rate.
> The historical total fertility rate was because women were not educated and empowered; forward looking fertility rate is the true neutral rate
It’s not possible for an outcome that would result one extinction of the species to be the “true neutral rate.” Rather, even if what you say is true (and I think it isn’t given people’s stated preference for 2-3 kids) what you’re seeing is a social contagion that will self correct when child-agnostic cultures die out in favor of cultures in which having children confers higher social status.
> It’s not possible for an outcome that would result one extinction of the species to be the “true neutral rate.” Rather, even if what you say is true (and I think it isn’t given people’s stated preference for 2-3 kids) what you’re seeing is a social contagion that will self correct when child-agnostic cultures die out in favor of cultures in which having children confers higher social status.
The only culture whose fertility rate isn't declining and converging around 0.5-1 is those in Israel, and they're going to have to figure out how to support themselves economically as the US tilts away from doing so due to political winds changing.
Good luck to those desiring "children confering high social status" as inflation continues to increase and the cost of everything increases long into the future due to climate change and structural demographics shrinking working age populations globally. Being poor sucks, everyone figures this out eventually, and the future will not be as nice as the recent past was. Kids have a cost, can those who want them for status afford them? We'll find out soon enough.
> and they're going to have to figure out how to support themselves economically as the US tilts away from doing so…
Hard to take you seriously as a “researcher” when you apply antisemitic tropes to math. Israel’s GDP is about $700 billion, and growing at 3% (that’s $20 billion) a year. US aid is about $3 billion a year.
It’s one thing to mime the meme for shits and giggles, but you’re now trying to use that in a rational argument.
Muslim Americans are among the most highly educated demographics in the U.S., and Mormons are around the average. So it’s definitely possible without turning the clock back before women had education and choices.
The census definition of “urban area” means nothing. I technically live in an “urban area” according to the census definition, but there’s soybean farms five minutes down the road from me.
The same is true for the definition of “childless” people. It counts my parents, who don’t have children living at home, but have my kids coming over to their house multiple times per week. Only 15% of women never have children. Most people arrange their living circumstances with the goal of eventually having kids. And once the kids grow up and leave, most people want to stay in the same area.
Never happens on the timescale of the next decade, maybe two. How far along is California high speed rail? When did they start?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail (construction began in 2015 and it won’t be operational until at least 2031, 16 years later) If you break ground today, you won’t see new public infrastructure operational for at least a decade. Brightline light rail was built in Florida and is approaching insolvency, even with 3M riders per year.
We could provide subsidies to move the disadvantaged to major urban cores with public transportation systems, I’d support that. Have to find the funds to do it though. Cheaper than trying to build anything new in the US for sure.
I hear this a lot, but it’s not an excuse for never starting. Amsterdam started taking their non-car infrastructure seriously in the 1970s and now it’s seen as an example for the rest of the world.
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.”
Asking to see a realistic roadmap and timeline is being a realist, not a defeatist. If Amsterdam started in the 1970s, that’s fifty years ago. Maybe we can make progress by the 2060s-2070s? Or we can just wait for China to manufacture all the EVs the world needs. Which is more likely to occur first?
Consider the US has $40T in debt and no will to raise taxes at this time, and therefore no will to spend on public infrastructure projects. Where will the capital come from?
How and when will we start? How many elections need to occur to appropriate funding? How much of the US electorate has to turn over for the right people to be elected to appropriate funding? Until shovels are in the ground, it’s vaporware and dreams.
It doesn’t have to be a massive nationwide project on par with the national highway project. It can start with local communities.
The mayor of Carmel, IN thought traffic circles were better than intersections and wanted more mixed use development. They have that now, nearly every intersection in the city has been replaced over time as they were due for routine work.
In Detroit they are in the process of building out a 29 mile greenway around the city.
These city level projects are a lot more important than the national ones, when it comes to reducing car traffic in cities and having an impact on people’s most frequent trips.
Seeing this at a local level could inspire more rail connections between cities, which could also come from the private sector. We have already seen a couple examples of this.
For anything funded by the federal government, you’re right. They have a huge mess on their hands, and need to get serious about cleaning it up. They have no business kicking of any major public works projects until that happens (though that has never stopped them in the past). But at a local level, things can still move forward and we are seeing it happen to some extent, though it often still feels more like a hobby than a firm conviction.
> Vote for people who will drop tariffs and allow the import of cheap EVs manufactured at scale
No. Globalism is bad. Better to have cars made domestically that are a bit more expensive to buy, but support local jobs. Better yet, ban electronics in cars so you can actually hold onto them and repair them yourself.
The US lost that global argument when it decided financialization mattered more than manufacturing. A majority of Americans cannot afford their basic needs to be met on their income, it’s not “a bit more expensive,” and it’s for legacy auto profits, not to maintain domestic production capacity.
No one is banning electronics in cars, and US legacy auto will never catch up. They made their choice to prioritize profits over investment.
> While the Big Three automakers—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—accounted for 92 percent of domestic auto share in 1965, this share would fall by half, to 46 percent, by 2015, and to 38 percent by 2024.
> From 1995 to 2022, China’s share of global automotive vehicle output skyrocketed eightfold, from 3 to 25 percent, while the U.S. share slid from 23 to 14 percent.
> In 2007, cars sold in the United States contained 38 percent U.S.- or Canadian-made content on average; that portion declined to 18 percent by 2023.
(BYD sells more EVs internationally than Ford does in total, and they intend to be the largest global automaker in the next five years)
> Millions of Hong Kongers were determined to keep the freedom they had enjoyed. The CCP has won, at least for now.
Fundamentally, I just don't see this frame as being a path to long term success for HK. If it is them v. the CCP: the CCP is alert to the political risk of HK, outnumbers them, controls the local military, has better propaganda and has more of a claim to success given that the British Empire has failed, the US Not-An-Empire seems to be struggling and morally bankrupt. At least the CCP has been delivering visible improvements in prosperity over the last few decades.
It is a tragedy to lose the jewel of Asia that was old school Hong Kong. But they really need a frame that acknowledges a bit of the present political realities - there'll need to be cooperation with major factions in mainland China. Probably within the CCP. I assume there is a liberalising faction of some sort.
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