Higher gas prices might encourage some positive change in folks when it comes to their travel choices. In the short term possibly more choosing to walk/bike (or more realistically choosing to abstain from going somewhere that they otherwise would’ve driven) and in the longer term it’ll encourage more efficient vehicles. Energy has been way too cheap in the US for too long and it really encourages a lot of the waste that we see

Not the person you asked, but you and everyone reading your comment know that’s not a good faith argument.

The reason incest is frowned upon and often illegal is because of the danger it poses to any potential offspring. Many genetic diseases rely on recessive traits that require both parents to carry the recessive trait in order for it to be exposed. If two biological siblings have a child, that child would therefore have a massive amount of recessive traits exposed since both parents would share a massive amount of DNA

At a population scale, genetic diversity is critical to survival of a population, and a collapse of genetic diversity through too much inbreeding tends to lead to a very unhealthy population that can be easily wiped out through disease. This is much less of a risk with random incest today thanks to how much humans move around these days, but the flip side is that there is some risk of this from so called “super surrogates” who have genetically fathered hundreds or thousands of kids. The likelyhood of these kids meeting and reproducing can be quite high, which can therefore noticably reduce genetic diversity in a population, and ultimately reduce the health of a population

Yeah at work I had a realization recently that power automate and similar systems with AI steps are going to be really powerful. Since you have a bunch of deterministic steps you can just have the AI do the one text manipulation bit where you don’t need deterministic output (handy for non-deterministic inputs for example)

I mean, as the law is written there’s zero requirement for the entered age to be verified, only to associate an age bracket with the OS user account and to provide that info to programs as they require it. Now, I do wonder if a California-compliant OS would require service accounts to have an entered date of birth and what kind of fun that could potentially lead to of you enter the date of account creation as the birthdate but the full ramifications remain to be seen

I mean this is generally a sign of growth by the content creator, shifting from whatever “personalized” ads the ad network decides to show, to having their own relationships with advertisers and doing their own ads. Honestly its a good thing because it means that the people making the content also have full control over who they sell ad space to and how that ad space is used, and if viable platforms other than Youtube existed, they would be able to to run their videos profitably without excessive user tracking

I mean choosing to believe things won’t get any better is just pessimistic thinking, plus its counter-productive because if you don’t believe in a better tomorrow how can you make today the first/next step towards a better tomorrow?

The best time to plan a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is now. Why not be hopeful about the future and lay the groundwork to make some small improvement to your corner of the earth?

I’ve never quite understood this, because the birth rate is highest at the lowest income level. So, the people who are least able to afford child care have the most kids.

The child tax credit makes a huge difference. It’s something like $6k per kid per year when they’re under the age of 8 I think it was? When you’re only making around 40-50k per year, an extra 8-10k each tax season is a huge opportunity to improve your finances. I knew one family that had 3 or 4 kids, probably made about 40k per year, they’d stop paying their electricity bill during the winter because the utility can’t legally disconnect you from your heating source in the winter then pay off the debt each tax season.

Additionally many of our social safety net programs are based on family income, with the income threshold increasing as family size increases, so a family making 50k a year with 1 kid might not qualify for food assistance, but a family making 50k a year with 3 kids probably will. Medicaid also will cover fulltime childcare in many states, further negating the financial hurdles of having kids, and once the kids are old enough you can have the older kids babysit the younger ones further reducing costs (of course parentification is very pervasive in this way!) there’s a lot of hurdles that this funding can bypass (then of course put parents in a tight spot that they have to figure out when a new technicality is added to kick them off of these benefits)

Green estimated that food makes up just 5% to 7% of household spending, but put housing at 35% to 45%, childcare at 20% to 40%, and health care at 15% to 25%.

Yeah that tracks. For my family we spend about $500/month on groceries, around 35% of our income on housing (call it about $1600/mo including utilities), and until our vehicle was paid off around 25% of our income went to that.

We got lucky in that we had a family member willing to babysit for us while I went back to college then when they started getting too toxic I snagged a job making just enough for my wife to be a stay at home mom. We absolutely could not have afforded kids if it weren’t for either of those factors didn’t work out. We’d probably still have my wife and I working opposing shifts and both being just sleep deprived enough to be biting each other’s heads off and possibly divorced by now (we had the opposing shifts thing going when we got married, and when she had a week off for her wedding, we both started getting good sleep again and stopped fighting and I had a second honeymoon phase as I was like “oh yeah I remember why I fell in love with you again!”)

The argument could be made that kids conceived right now will be the next richest generation as we have to be rapidly approaching the breaking point with the current second gilded age

Its a movie franchise about swordfighting space wizards, and that’s honestly enough to discredit the top-level comment without diving deeper