patrick.net

Dan8267 says

Today it takes two incomes just to make ends meet, and that's without owning a second home. The difference is supply-side economics which devastated the middle class.

The difference is the devastation of American manufacturing jobs by globalization.

Ordinary American workers cannot compete with Chinese and Mexicans willing to work for far less.

Our owners benefited by paying 3rd world wages in the 3rd world rather than American wages in America.
Consumers benefitted by buying cheaper shit at Walmart, which also devastated Main Street retail.
3rd world workers benefitted by getting zillions of manufacturing jobs.
American workers lost because jobs disappeared.

Dan8267 says

Strategist says

I wonder what caused the obesity rates to trend for the worse after 1980. Just look at that slope.

Errc is partially correct on this one. The increase in obesity in Americans is almost entirely due to diet, specifically increase consumption of carbohydrates, sugars, and high.

For the first time I was beginning to show a beer belly. All my friends started noticing it. I started having fruit, and only fruit for lunch 4 to 5 times a week. It worked like magic...no more beer belly.

This is graph is interesting. More women are "extremely obese" but more men are just "overweight".

Source: NHANES, 2009–2010

https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/overweight-obesity

Indiana Jones says

This is graph is interesting. More women are "extremely obese" but more men are just "overweight".

Source: NHANES, 2009–2010

https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/overweight-obesity

The metrics for this are utter shit

At peak of my fitness days I was obese by their standards, with no stored fat to spare. Just a brick shit house of muscle which is denser/heavier than fat

rando says

The difference is the devastation of American manufacturing jobs by globalization.

That is also largely due to republican economic policies. However, globalization and the loss of manufacturing jobs is not sufficient to explain the decline of the middle class. The middle class has gotten squeezed by many policies and deregulations.

https://www.amazon.com/What-Went-Wrong-Hijacked-Countries/dp/1937856712

APOCALYPSEFUCK_is_ADORABLE says

I drag citrus and apples on airplanes and everyone around me gets excited when I start peeling them.

Only because they think you are making a bong and they want a hit. Serves you right for flying Delta.

Fear of child support? One drunken mistake could cost you 30% of your pay for 18 years.

The corrupt and vile family court system is certainly one of the primary reasons most men today won't ever consider marrying, and it does contribute to the decrease in birthrates.

Where are the porn splooging vs. actual human contact ratios?

APOCALYPSEFUCK_is_ADORABLE says

I think the fact that planes smell like stale clam farts

Clams fart? How do they get away with that when the bubbles would be so visible?

There are some great reasons given here and I think you guys are hitting the nail on the heads with the following:

- People are waiting longer to have kids... often into years that extend beyond the prime sexual years.

- Obesity: No time in our human history has obesity been a bigger problem than it is today. And carrying additional weight is one of the top libido killers.

- People are in a technological twilight zone. Smart Phones, internet, electronic gadgets, apps, porn, you name it... People are so connected electronically and have so much stimulation and entertainment at their disposal that its serving to absolutely wear people out.

zzyzzx says

our collective obesity

All I have to do is go out in public, especially the grocery store, and see people who are so fat they can hardly walk and they're not that old, maybe mid-30's to mid-50's, and often see them with a breathing tube in their nose. I saw a really disgusting sight about three weeks ago--a woman on a scooter, probably in her late 40's, so fat she hung off all sides of the seat and with legs twice as big as normal and the worst thing was a half full bag of urine hanging on the back with a tube going back you know where.

zzyzzx says

I already knew that having kids ruins your sex life, it's on my long list of reasons not to have kids.

Evolutionary dead end.
Evolution created sex to have kids.

BayArea says

- People are waiting longer to have kids... often into years that extend beyond the prime sexual years.

Delayed reproduction would only lower the fertility rate for a short period of time. That cannot be the explanation because for every kid a 20-something does not have because he's waiting to be 30-something is a kid that a 30-something will have ten years later that he wouldn't have had otherwise. Delayed reproduction is not lower reproduction.

The statistics clearly show that fewer people are having children and those who do are having fewer children, and that these changes happened over the past 30 years.

Porn reduces rape, not the desire of men to become fathers. Perhaps sex with condoms has reduced the fertility rate because of eliminating unwanted pregnancies, but that's a good thing and it does not explain why many men and women are choosing to never have children. Nor is there anything magical about electronics over the past 30 years that have reduced the desire of men and women to have children.

What does seem to have an effect are
1. Overcrowding (particularly in Japan)
2. Financial stress
3. What's been called feminism since the 1970s
4. The family court system raping men
5. The unattractiveness of most women because of obesity and (3).
6. The fact that men are biologically wired not to want to settle down with women who have mated with other men. Commitment is very costly for men, so they need parental certainty in exchange or its not worth forgoing other sexual pursuits.
7. Female hypergamy
8. A change in the belief that one's value comes from reproduction to valuing happiness in life.

In any case, the fewer people crapping out children and the fewer children being crapped out is ultimately a good thing. Why add pressure to a pot that's already ripe for exploding?

zzyzzx says

Why Americans are having less sex

With other people.

Heraclitusstudent says

Evolutionary dead end.

Evolution created sex to have kids.

A simplistic and inaccurate view of evolution.

Direct reproduction is hardly necessary. Many species do mostly without it. Furthermore, over 99.9% of your genetic code is identical to every human being on the planet. Even without having kids, considerably more than 99.9% of your genetic material survives as long as the species survives. Ecological destruction and nuclear war are the pretty much the only way any person alive today could become an evolutionary dead end.

When you add to that the inevitability of designer babies, all of your useful genes will survive whether or not you reproduce and all of your inferior genes will not regardless of whether or not your reproduce.

Of course, why should you even care if your genes survive? They aren't you. They aren't your allies. At best, genes are a means to an end, not an end of themselves except to themselves. Eventually the entire human race will evolve to the point where our descendants don't have much of your genes anyway regardless of how many offspring you have. Who cares how our descendants get to point C, whether through path A or B, when the destination is the same?

And genetic immortality means nothing as well. How much does it mean to you if some of your cells are kept alive and replicating indefinitely and harvested for research like Henrietta Lacks? What does mindless reproduction of cells with your genetic code amount to?

Was this adjusted for Age? We have a large cohort of old farts; in the 70s, 80s,and 90s they were in their 20s-40s.

zzyzzx says

But I already knew that having kids ruins your sex life, it's on my long list of reasons not to have kids.

If the human race ends, it will all be your fault.

Dan8267 says

Heraclitusstudent says

Evolutionary dead end.


Evolution created sex to have kids.

A simplistic and inaccurate view of evolution.

Direct reproduction is hardly necessary. Many species do mostly without it. Furthermore, over 99.9% of your genetic code is identical to every human being on the planet. Even without having kids, considerably more than 99.9% of your genetic material survives as long as the species survives. Ecological destruction and nuclear war are the pretty much the only way any person alive today could become an evolutionary dead end.

When you add to that the inevitability of designer babies, all of your useful genes will survive whether or not you reproduce and all of your inferior genes will not regardless of whether or not your reproduce.

Of course, why should you even care if your genes survive? They aren't you. They aren't your all...

You are probably right on this, but human instinct does not care for what you said above. People did not know nor would they have cared about genetics and evolution. The need to have your own babies is very powerful. Sadly, that need tends to die down in developed countries as can be seen in the birth rates of Europe and Japan. Nature ensured we keep having sex and producing babies, but with modern contraceptives we can keep having sex without making babies.
Science was responsible for the huge population the planet has today, and science may one day be responsible for the end of the human race.

Also, a good time to remind folks that not getting erections-on-demand into the 70s and 80s is called "Normal" and should not be covered by Part D.

Too many distracting commercials

TwoScoopsMcGee says

Also, a good time to remind folks that not getting erections-on-demand into the 70s and 80s is called "Normal" and should not be covered by Part D.

Having insurance cover your viagra is kinda silly to me. It increases the insurance cost for everyone. Why would I want to pay for a horny dude's desire for a pussy? The next thing they will want is insurance to cover their needs for a whore.
Cant be sure, but i believe something like that exists in Sweden where a hospital paid a whore for a patients need to have sex

Dan8267 says

FortWayne says

High taxes and liberal policies have consequences

This is utter bullshit. People aren't having less sex or fewer children because of taxes. They are having fewer children because republican policies, particularly those from Ronald Reagan, have squeezed the middle class making supporting a family way the fuck harder.

In the 1950s, a time when taxes where way the fuck higher, a single income family could afford a primary home and a vacation home and eating out several times a week. Today it takes two incomes just to make ends meet, and that's without owning a second home. The difference is supply-side economics which devastated the middle class. You hero Reagan is the reason why people cannot afford to raise families anymore.

You are totally clueless Dan as usual. People today have to work a lot harder, and for less money. They have to struggle for housing in CA, they have to struggle to pay for education. And it's all because of the Democratic policies. Democrats socialize everything, driving everything down to lowest common denominator, and that makes everything expensive. Taxes are high, cost of living is high, but standards of living are down.

Solution is simple, tax reform that lowers tax rates and restores incentives for working people. But you communists/socialists don't want freedom, you want government to tax everyone into poverty to share in your misery of idiocy.

Feminists pushing women into work force, what do you think women are going to do when they are exhausted at the end of the day after work? Your team Dan, your team. Team epic failure.

And 50's weren't that great, there were years when people didn't have enough food to eat, this was post WW2 and mind you the rest of the world didn't produce anything because their factories were still bombed down.

FortWayne says

People today have to work a lot harder, and for less money.

This is a result of Reaganomics.

FortWayne says

They have to struggle for housing in CA

This is a result of not appropriately taxing land consumption resulting in land hording. Increase taxes on land and decrease taxes on income.

FortWayne says

they have to struggle to pay for education

Another failure of capitalism. It's not education that's unaffordable. You get that for free from the Internet, which holds virtually all of mankind's knowledge. You can learn anything in your underwear for free.

No, it's college that is unaffordable, and that's entirely due to capitalism. The solution is to create a single, national, virtual, public university. Yes, socialism is the solution to that particular problem. The cost per student per year would be under $100 because a virtual university scales. The more students, the cheaper it is per student. Costs are largely fixed unlike physical university. And without profit taking, it would serve society better and encourage learning and the development of skills.

FortWayne says

Democrats socialize everything,

No, they don't.

FortWayne says

socialize everything, driving everything down to lowest common denominator, and that makes everything expensive

You mean like the military, the largest socialist program we have, and the most expensive. Cut that and your damn taxes will go down, a lot. I've shown in another thread that if we cut the military by 90%, we'd still be in line with the biggest military spenders in the world, all but two of which are close allies and one of which is a most favored trading partner, and no income below $127,695/yr would be subject to the federal income tax.

You don't get to bitch about taxes if you support the majority of discretionary spending. You are the reason your taxes are so damn high.

And you foolishly ignore how much employers tax their employees before the government takes a penny. The typical employer is taxing at least a third of a person's wealth production and in many cases way more than half. That's more than the federal income tax.

FortWayne says

Solution is simple, tax reform that lowers tax rates and restores incentives for working people.

If you want to incentivize people to work then reform the economy so that lazy golf-playing executives don't take the lion's share of the working class's wealth production. Make total executive compensation equal to exactly twice the median income of all employees including outsourced ones.
FortWayne says

But you communists/socialists don't want freedom,

1. I'm not a communist and you have to be an idiot if you think I am after all I've written on the matter. You demonstrate stupidity every time you use those two terms interchangeably.

2. You are a bigger socialist than me. You just prefer to use socialism to benefit welfare queens in the military industrial complex, whereas I apply socialism to appropriate areas like infrastructure. In fact, I don't think I've advocated socialism for anything other than infrastructure (roads, power, sewers, police, fire fighters, education, Internet, health care, food, etc.). Nonetheless, the total dollars spent on socialist programs under my policies is less than the total spent on socialist programs under you policies because you would spend so much on warfare. So don't bitch about my use of socialism like a hypocrite.

FortWayne says

Feminists pushing women into work force, what do you think women are going to do when they are exhausted at the end of the day after work? Your team Dan, your team.

1. You clearly have no idea what my team is.

2. I have never stated that women must enter the work force. My position is that every individual should decide for himself or herself how much to work, where to work, when to work, and what to work on, and the pay is determined entirely by wealth creation and nothing else.

3. The reason women work today is that they have to. A single income is no longer sufficient to raise a family because after currency debasement wages have gone down. Any way you slice it, this is because of capitalism, the giving of all power over production and distribution to owners and letting them set the price of labor. Productivity has increased six fold since the 1950s, yet real wages are less. This is entirely due to capitalism, which does not reward productivity. Capitalism rewards one and only one thing, bargaining power, and the bargaining power of the working class has greatly diminished since the 1950s. That's the facts.

FortWayne says

And 50's weren't that great, there were years when people didn't have enough food to eat, this was post WW2 and mind you the rest of the world didn't produce anything because their factories were still bombed down.

That's the first true thing that you've said, but it's irrelevant to everything else in this discussion. The significance of that statement is that Keynesian economics is dead wrong about what ended the First Great Depression. It wasn't aggregate demand. It was lack of competition.

TwoScoopsMcGee says

Was this adjusted for Age? We have a large cohort of old farts; in the 70s, 80s,and 90s they were in their 20s-40s.

Let's face it, the boomers can't do it any more without 5 doses of Viagra, and many millennials stay virgins until they leave their high school rooms at 31.

Dan8267 says

This is a result of not appropriately taxing land consumption resulting in land hording.

Not true Dan. Plenty of empty land sits there owned by government where people aren't permitted to build because of zoning laws and hippies like you telling everyone that we are destroying mother nature. Cost of building is so high, not to mention it's complicated with all the rules and know how that most people just don't know where to even start. As usual Dan, you don't understand the issue.

Dan8267 says

Another failure of capitalism. It's not education that's unaffordable. You get that for free from the Internet, which holds virtually all of mankind's knowledge. You can learn anything in your underwear for free.

No, it's college that is unaffordable, and that's entirely due to capitalism. The solution is to create a single, national, virtual, public university. Yes, socialism is the solution to that particular problem. The cost per student per year would be under $100 because a virtual university scales. The more students, the cheaper it is per student. Costs are largely fixed unlike physical university. And without profit taking, it would serve society better and encourage learning and the development of skills.

Here I do agree Dan, solution is online education. Not a system controlled by old guard unions and bureaucrats with tenure who have all the incentive to keep their system going and prevent anything else from arising in it's place. You have a rare spike of logical thought, I'm almost proud of you... just try to keep this going.

I think my old aunt summed up this argument best: "If good people don't have babies, then only the bad people will have babies!"

So if you think you're of superior genetic stock, perhaps you should consider pumping out a few kids. Otherwise the world will be populated by whatever the low income crowd can generate.

Then again, raising children requires a parent to acquire a sense of selflessness, which is wa-a-a-a-aaaaay(Imagine Dr.Cox from "Scrubs" here rolling his eyes furiously) beyond people like Dan who is doomed to die alone and unmourned.

Because they are afraid cops will show up in the middle of the night through an unlocked front door.

Dan8267 says

Another failure of capitalism. It's not education that's unaffordable. You get that for free from the Internet, which holds virtually all of mankind's knowledge. You can learn anything in your underwear for free.

You can't get an education from the internet. You can get information from the internet and make yourself more knowledgeable, but real education comes from school and Universities.

FortWayne says

Plenty of empty land sits there owned by government where people aren't permitted to build because of zoning laws and hippies like you telling everyone that we are destroying mother nature.

1. That is not the reason land, and thus housing, is expensive in New York City or Florida.
2. It does not matter how much land there is. Demand will grow without bounds if land hording is profitable.
3. Eliminate rent seeking and tax land exponentially with total land owned, and you find the existing usable land is far more than sufficient to provide affordable, good housing to all.
4. If you think I'm a hippie, you're an idiot. Have you ever read anything I've written on hippies?

FortWayne says

Cost of building is so high

That's crap. The cost of buying a USED house built 20, 40, 80, 100 years ago is high. That's not due to building costs because nothing is being built. Nothing is being rezoned.

FortWayne says

. Not a system controlled by old guard unions and bureaucrats with tenure who have all the incentive to keep their system going and prevent anything else from arising in it's place.

That is just one of many reasons why virtualization is the way to go. However, it has to be socialistic. The government must own the virtual school. The school must be paid for by public tax dollars even though it's still dirt cheap compared to the status quo, so to encourage maximum use. The textbooks used must be public domain. No copyrights. No owners. No royalties.

It's cheaper to pay a mathematician one million dollars to write the definitive calculus book than to keep paying $80/yr for a book to a publisher. And there are plenty of subject experts that would gladly write a definitive text book for a measly one million dollars.

Put simply, capitalism fails at all infrastructure including education. Also, physical campuses fail at providing equal opportunity. Finally, people don't scale, and that includes teachers. So we need an education system in which the number of teachers is proportional to the number of courses, not the number of students, and virtualization is the only way to accomplish this. The down side is that all the teachers will have to get new jobs, but hey, making jobs obsolete is a good thing as long as the wealth isn't owned by a bunch of parasitic fat cats who didn't even create the automations.

FortWayne says

I'm almost proud of you... just try to keep this going.

I suspect the only reason you like my suggestion is that you want teachers to be fired because they are part of the enemy tribe, and you're all about tribalism.

I think virtual education is the way to go DESPITE teachers losing jobs because schools exist to serve the student and the student's needs take precedent.

Strategist says

You can't get an education from the internet.

Your statement is empirically false.

http://www.worldscienceu.com/

Dan8267 says

Furthermore, over 99.9% of your genetic code is identical to every human being on the planet.

A specious argument considering even 1 gene can make a huge difference and evolution works at the margin. There is in fact a huge variety of human beings.

Dan8267 says

When you add to that the inevitability of designer babies

The future is not inevitable. Designer babies may or may not happen. Civilization may collapse before they do, or they may remain a luxury that will be drowned in an ocean of non-designed lust babies.

It’s possible that all of civilization happened because of periods during which smarter people had more surviving kids. Relatively successful periods like Pax Romana may have bred legions of idiots that could only reversed through a thousand years of harsh misery. Unfortunately we now have a population of spoiled and self-centered narcissists who are way too lazy to pass on what they got.
They are in fact evolutionary dead-ends, and will be gone within what is an instant in the history of humanity, leaving the planet to hordes of more simple minded but fertile people.
History doesn’t stop where we decide it should, and neither does evolution.

Dan8267 says

why should you even care if your genes survive? They aren't you.

ME, ME, ME. I guess that's the point: having kids is not about YOU.

We need that law, folks! One child policy. Particular heroes - Nobel Prize winners, Medal of Honor Winners, National Science Academy Members, can have a second child without the $100,000 bond.

Dan8267 says

2. It does not matter how much land there is. Demand will grow without bounds if land hording is profitable.

There is no land hording. It's a simple supply/demand. Something liberals clearly don't understand very well, when (demand > supply = prices go up). It's free to live on all that empty land between LA and SF, but no one wants to live there. Yet everyone crowds into a tiny square space in SF or LA downtown for good paying jobs and screams it's unaffordable. Well, duh!

Dan you liberals really don't do well with economics, it's not your thing. All you know is equality and hand outs, and that's the base you reason from, hence you will never be right.

Heraclitusstudent says

A specious argument considering even 1 gene can make a huge difference and evolution works at the margin.

This hardly advocates self reproduction since that 1 gene is just as likely to be in your sexual competitor as it is to be in you. Tell me, does anyone willingly forgo reproduction and a desirable mate because one's competitor may be genetically better?

In any case, even very important genes tend to get clobbered in modern populations because they cannot compete with all the competitions. For example, there are two common types of cholesterol, low density (LDL) and high density (HDL), with LDL being bad and HDL being good. However, there is a gene in people in an isolated community in Italy that produces a third kind of high density cholesterol that is super good and caused the people there to live very long and healthy lives. This gene was brought in by an individual that migrated to the isolated community. Had he not, the gene would have never had the opportunity to flourish.

The moral of the story is that if you were actually concerned about advancing human evolution more quickly, you'd isolated all of humanity into many small pockets and rarely interbred them.

Heraclitusstudent says

Designer babies may or may not happen.

History has shown that if there is a demand for something and it's not forbidden by the laws of nature, eventually technology will make it happen.

Heraclitusstudent says

Civilization may collapse before they do,

In which case, there would be far greater problems to worry about than your genetic code. In any case, if civilization is to collapse, it most likely would happen due to something caused, at least largely, by overpopulation.

Heraclitusstudent says

ME, ME, ME. I guess that's the point: having kids is not about YOU.

Projecting much?

My philosophy has always been "the messenger is irrelevant".

Why are you so ego-eccentric?

TwoScoopsMcGee says

We need that law, folks! One child policy. Particular heroes - Nobel Prize winners, Medal of Honor Winners, National Science Academy Members, can have a second child without the $100,000 bond.

I would simply make parenting something that requires a license that includes a financial responsibility test such as $100k in savings per child. For great scientists, give them $100k or more so they automatically qualify.

FortWayne says

There is no land hording.

It's amazing how divorce your mind is from reality. Obviously you know nothing about New York City where landlords have horded land for generations. Or about foreigners buying up real estate in Florida.

FortWayne says

Something liberals clearly don't understand very well, when (demand > supply = prices go up).

I fully understand that. What you clearly do not understand is that land hording both increases demand and decreases supply, which means prices go up. Why do I have to explain such obvious things to you?

FortWayne says

Dan you liberals really don't do well with economics, it's not your thing.

Oh honey, I've given numerous real world examples of why the conservative right sucks at economics, business, and running an economy. That greatly outweighs your baseless assertion.