cf. (& credit where it’s due)

It gets worse with every new panel/fact I’m exposed to against my will

I think that there are a lot of reasonable inferences that go into people’s attempts to model “Will I be able to shoulder the costs of raising one or more human beings?” and that it’s pretty sensitive to real economic conditions, like whether you feel your QOL is less secure than your parents’

I think that the desire many people have to have a family is somewhat predicated on a basic level of felt safety/security, especially in industrialized countries, and that the signals people use to measure “do I feel secure enough to support kids?” are highly self-referential and subjective, BUT

But that might be a decent-enough frame of reference for what’s been going on globally as the proportion of productivity gains that workers get a shrinking slice of the pie. The Scandinavian countries seem to be poised to raid the coffers of their remaining social welfare programs

Tbh it’s hard for me to think outside of the American frame of reference, where quantitatively it might be ~possible~ for the average household to eke out an existence but the wealth, security and material comfort attainable for most families has been declining since the mid-twentieth century

Idk if anyone has actually done an analysis of whether eurostyle quality-of-life welfare policies are correlates with increases in birth rate but it doesn’t seem like any of the post-Marshall plan countries managed to stay out of the negatives. Not sure how eg USSR stacks up alongside those

Excellent problematization of the problem. The “demographic transition” model logic feels like it’s usually explained like a chemical reaction—something that just happens at a critical threshold, but then you can’t incrementally unbake the cake back to a titrated sweet spot of 2.5 kids per household

purpose is a curse

curses aren't real

you are free

Ngltbqhimho that’s kind of offensive to hard-working fetish artists

Forbes and similar outlets are reporting on the same anecdote, although they introduce some doubt, suggesting that it could be quasi-factual propaganda meant to stir up uncertainty over what the US is capable of

Surprised that (at first brush at least from what I can tell) Vannevar Bush doesn’t seem to have been involved in any of this lol

No, but I will bookmark this rabbit hole for later, good god

Yeah, I mean, to add on to your point, it’s a weird strategic heel turn bc the US had been achieving similar ends by neocolonial means (collaborate w ambitious politician/warlord, he does the dirty work to expropriate resource rights, then let multinational corps eg Nestle come in to capitalize)

My too-tidy-to-be-true pet conspiracy theory is that they’re making these land grabs now bc they want control over as many material inputs to data center construction as possible, they’re hoping to head off a bubble popping and they assume international “rules based order” is over bc climate change

Yeah I hadn’t even considered this angle for Greenland til I saw an article about it—I think I had assumed it was control over future drilling (& potentially shipping routes) near the arctic circle but that would be very stupid bc we could have just put bases there

Maybe so. I agree that Trump’s motives are probably some asinine inscrutable nonsense that only his dementia-riddled Id can really understand, but I ~do~ wonder if there was some military planning already in place and/or some pressure from tech billionaires

Fair, yeah. I guess some of the coverage about billionaires jumping on board very quickly had me wondering whose idea this actually was. But ofc they could just be reacting, trying to pounce on a potential opportunity. Idk

We love weaponized autism don’t we folks