That might be true for the subset of suicides the author has studied, but there are about as many reasons humans commit suicide as there are reasons they commit homicide, which is to say, infinite varieties.
There's religious (Heavean's Gate, that recent kenyan cult), protest (self-immolating monks), media spectacle (Yukio Mishima), honor (seppuku, the samurai ritual mishima was immitating), shame (pompei), escape (L pills) fiancial ruin (1929 brokers), and fads (90s school shooters). Then there's suicide as a way of life (downtown SF, opioid epidemic).
The idea that this is all caused by "suffering" that could be prevented through increasingly sophiaticated treatmant plans or perhaps extended social welfare programs is a peculiar modern secular idea. I wonder if people who believe this sincerely are staving off their own suicide this way.
That is a good way of looking at it. What's missing is a catchy name to debase store-based installation similar to what was done through "sideloading". Perhaps "lord-loading", "begstalling", "babybiting", etc.
China has done what's only being talked about in the west: successfully broken up a powerful tech conglomerate.
One needn't resort to the kind of marxist leninist tactics that were at play here to achieve the same outcome, but all we'll get is more talk, or if things go really well, 5 mini googles just in time for openai, bing or someone else to become the next search monopoly.
The problem is that children, rather than free farm labor, are now too expensive, while the wages on which the majority of people depend, are too unpredictable and intermittent for the kind of long term involvement 2.1+ children represent.
If countries want to solve their fertility problem, they can waste their time with various tricks and "incentives" to postpone what they'll eventually have to do for geopolitical reasons alone, which is to go to war with their own business community.
Capital controls, tarrifs, sector bargaining -- the exploding heads of think tank libertarians guide the way like lit torches through a swampy marsh.
If wage earners can be assured that they are taken care of irrespective of the spasms of the global market, they can have children. Otherwise they will persist in their state of soft rebellion, which is marked by low fertility and low laber market participation, among others.
Is that really all to it? Look at Germany, it's pretty stable if you are a wage earner, especially if you have an engineering diploma. They don't make more kids even though they are safe, and they have generous paternity leave.
There is something else going on, I feel a kind of ambiant negativity induced by the global warming news, which seem to block people to have kids.
>Look at Germany, it's pretty stable if you are a wage earner, especially if you have an engineering diploma. They don't make more kids even though they are safe, and they have generous paternity leave.
Even for those stable engineers, it's hard to afford a home. Also you start earning money late at 25, because you needed those pesky degrees. Now you are 30, have a modicum of money, and want to live a little first. So you have fun until 35. Now you're looking for a life partner, you find them at 40. But you need to be financially stable, so you save up for a downpayment, you wait a few years until 45 to start a family.
You now notice you can't have kids because you're too old. The end.
I ask my young colleagues in their late 20s early 30s why they don't make kids.
They say they don't feel like it, they are afraid of the commitment and prefer to have fun. How long is the fun supposed to be is unclear.
I had my fun while being a student, I did my studies in a foreign country, so when I started work I didn't mind having my first child (was 28).
I keep warning them how tiring it is to raise a child, and you better do it while you're healthy.
I've never understood the whole "party it up in college" thing. Like number one, I had to go to class and then do school work. I also had to work a shit job to try and not end up drowning in debt for school. I basically did the "996" thing (12 hour days 6 days a week) between school and work for years. It was not a party for me. Also I have zero interest in putting a child through that or many aspects of the modern world.
Well, having fun is a very subjective thing. I was not a party guy neither but I must admit I did not need to work like you.
It is just that I went abroad to study. That was an adventure for me as I could barely speak English at 18.
I lived 5 years in the UK, then I worked 7 years in Germany. It fulfilled my need to discover the world and gave me a better insight about what is good or bad in a country.
Now I am having fun by doing cycling trips several days with my son. We are eagerly waiting for the sun.
I don't see what young people see, what is bad about the modern world? We are not at war, we have an incredible comfort, I don't get why it is not a good time to have children (if you want one of course).
I think people should just stop trying to plan everything and just do something and improvise.
Disclaimer: having children is a money sink and limiting factor when want to pursue your career, but it is not blocking you.
Well, being somewhat homeless is an issue for me as well. While the idea of being a free spirit is nice, I suspect that society will more or less expect me to provide shelter for said children. As I said, there really are multiple problems with the whole idea.
Studying AND "living a little" at the same time isn't that hard with all the exchange programs EU universities provide. Traveling within Europe is also very cheap. It's mainly just an excuse for people who don't want children that much, which is now more common due to cultural changes as well.
Expensive housing on the other hand is a real problem. Requiring a long degree for nearly everything is also dumb.
I could barely survive on the money I was able to earn during uni. Bafög was denied but parents couldn't support me properly either. So no, I couldn't live a little in uni. I needed a proper salary for that.
It's a huge host of reasons and they all have a tiny cumulative effect. Also after a while it also reaches a tipping point in that "all my friends aren't having kids so why should I".
The reasons vary based on who you ask and their bias. My bias will be obvious. Here's my list:
- War on traditional family values. That includes marriage and having kids.
- War on men.
- Toxic and degenerate pop culture promoted to teens.
- Hookup culture, dating apps, easy and promoted and celebrated divorces
- Daddy government is there aleays to provide a huge cushion for badly picked marriages. For women at least.
- Men are scared away from marriage due to the legal system being skewed against them.
- Promotion and glorification of party culture. Having kids and a stable marriage is Hard. If everything is handed on a platter to you from an early age and you're shielded from the realities and difficulties of life, this is going to seem like a huge life decision that is too hard.
- We don't realize how much our collective fiddling and tweaking with various parts of our world with laws and incentives is having on society and culture. We're fucking it up royally. Just look at how degenerate pop culture is atm, and look at it honestly, and wonder if it's healthy for society on the aggregate.
I think some elements of this are true, and yes I think culture plays a big part in it.
I am sorta on the opposite side of this I want to have kids, get married, I'm willing to support my husband if I make more then him (whenever I get one), but I feel like I'm just not stable enough yet. Most of my tech jobs are short lived, I'm also trying to run my own business and just don't have the time to do a lot right now. I grew up with parents with hugh issues with money and they divorced and I don't want that for my future. I don't want to fight over money or jobs or small stupid stuff that doesn't matter in life.
I think honestly a lot of people just don't feel like they are in a stable position, we also don't have strong communities anymore that helps out when stuff does get hard like marriage or raising kids. I think honestly a lot of people are really lonely and just live with it because they don't know how to fix it. We don't have systems or places in place that make it easy to hang out nor do we have the time nowadays. Or at least I don't. I'm in my 30's though and I'm in a long distance relationship but it sounds really hard to imagine actually getting married anytime soon I just have so much going on. I really believe people want to feel loved and have someone to love, I think a lot of our society now though is hyper competitive, commercialized and no longer built for families. People don't trust anymore and it's a fear driven culture.
Most of my friends have been married or in long term relationships for at least a decade now. None are divorced. With one exception none have children and we're all approaching 40. Your list doesn't address why my peer group is choosing not to have kids.
I don't know what to tell you. My guess would be that they all enjoy the leisure lifestyle that's not disturbed by children. Maybe they're scared of having children by the possibility of them being bullied at school due to the prevalence of thug culture? School shootings? Maybe Greta and that camp have them so scared that they'll be destroying the environment by having kids? Maybe they are guilted by woke culture about being white so they want to wipe out their own race. Who knows.
At the end of the day. Ask them why. Then poke and prod till they tell you the core of why they think that way. Then see what in recent culture or happenings might have caused them to think that way.
I'm not at a loss as to why my friends aren't having kids. I'm at a loss as to why you think your list is relevant to why my friends are having kids. You've produced a fine list of culture war talking points but none of the simple stuff. No talk of economic problems or people not wanting to continue the same destructive cycles and finally feeling like they have the option. Instead it's all "Greta" and "woke culture" and "white guilt".
My comments seem not welcome to you. Speak to your friends, as I won't engage further in an antagonizing discussion that seems to be turning personal with you.
Well, in this case the choices are personal as they are effecting myself, my wife, and my friends. I suppose it's understandable to feel OK infantilizing people and making arguments around culture war hot topics if you're not personally involved, but the implication that it's something like white guilt or the war on men is detached, disrespectful, and antagonizing.
Increased education requirements to not live in poverty is the #1 reason in my opinion.
When parents expected young children to perform unpaid manual labor the net cost of upbringing was negligible or even profitable.
Now many people only start earning at 21 or later, and aren't even able to support their parents at the point due to the huge size of mortgage and college loans.
I wish countries stopped trying to "solve their fertility problem." We don't need so many people. We don't need laborers to exploit. We should focus on technological and robotic solutions to the labor shortage.
People think kids are too expensive because of the expectation of what kids cost. Not just monetarily but also in terms of time.
You see it especially in Asian countries like South Korea. Kids mean hiring tutors, violin lessons, test prep, etc. Because of course my kid won't be average, he's going to be a next Bill Gates and that costs a lot of money.
Google's is the best business the world and chatgpt opens up round 2 over who gets the hold the rains of that beast.
The hype originates in the business comminity, and it's about all the money that will be made, not technology.
The technology part is over as far as business is concerned. It's good enough to get everyone in the world to type their every need into this textbox rather than another. Everything else is downstream from there.
Transformers, rotators, discombulators, those things get nerds excited, but what's whipping people into a frenzy is the race to GOOG 2.0
I think at the same time you're ignoring the deep problems that are affecting google right now. Google makes their money on ads, and AI could deeply effect that market causing them drastic profitability drops.
Doesn't matter what you can make, companies don't cut their own throat in the short term, even if it will kill them in the long term.
> Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess"
Also, remote work opens the door to replace expensive domestic workers with cheap foreign ones. If your employees are going to be pictures on your screen anyway, might as well pick ones that worker harder and complain less.
For what it's worth, this might finally open the eyes of many SWEs that they're plain workers with little bargaining power and that their inflated salaries are a historical accident owning to many of the current tech barons having been engineers themselves at one point, throwing a larger bone than they otherwise would have to. Other than that, there's few reasons, and certainly no market-based ones, why those salaries should be as high as they are, when they're cheap just across the border.
If remote work being granted and taken arbitrarily -- with not even an attempt at justifying it in terms of business demands -- hasn't alerted you to the feudal reality of the modern tech corporation, perhaps being laid off will do the trick.
Broad pro labour legislation would be the answer here, but while the libertarian crackpot religion remains strong in overclass circles, there's not going to be anything of the sort.
Of course, the problem is that the trade is on offer at all.
In the antiquated view that the government exists for the protection of the people, rather than to coddle corporations and sacrificing at the altar of competitiveness, it would be simply shut down.
If the antiquated view is that people in one country don’t have to compete in a global marketplace but rather are owed a higher-paying job by virtue of birthplace, I’m OK with the new view (even though I had the good fortune to have that birthplace).
Yes it absolutely is, but imo less so than what GitHub Copilot and various image generation companies are doing. My theory is that if AI turns out to be as disruptive as the current hype suggests, the conflict between those who feed the AI vs. those who profit from it might be the next big social rift.
Artists are already in full rebellion against this, as they should be, being nearly eclipsed by AI, except when it comes to inventing new styles and hand-crafting samples for the models to train on. These, I assume, are either scraped off the web, or signed away in unfair ToS of various online publishing platforms.
Since the damage individually is small (they took some code from me without attribution, ok) but collectively enormous, in my opinion it the role of government to step in and soften the blow if necessary.
> Artists are already in full rebellion against this,
Huh? No. Some artists are maybe?
> as they should be, being nearly eclipsed by AI
Not even close. It's like looking at the newest brand of clip art.
Non-artists don't (maybe can't) know that particular feeling, at least not with regard to being told you're angry about "what's supposed to look like art".
(Heck, artists have been told that with regard to other humans' art for centuries, for one)
Going even further, a lot of artists already know how to build on this new tech without ripping people off.
I used to teach college art classes and would have loved to integrate this topic into the curriculum. It'd be a great ongoing discussion, no matter the legal outcomes.
I can't think of a company more blatantly engaged in anti-competitive practices than Apple, but I'm glad to see all that unfairly amassed wealth benefitting even the lowest rungs of its corporate hierarchy through the unusual benefit of not being terminated at the drop of a hat. Bravo!
Amazon, Meta, Google are most certainly cut from the same cloth, only slightly smaller. For Wal-Mart I can't think of anything strictly anit-competitive, but its practice of paying sub-subsistance wages and counting on government relief programs to make up the difference is so disgusting I don't know how to describe. Time-Warner, Comcast I'm not too familiar with, but as I understand they are under regulations that prohibit them from dropping your connection when e.g. they find you visiting ycombinatior.com, a site where their business is frequently ridiculed, which is certainly a step in the right direction and the model that should be applied broadly and forcefully to all of the above.
These companies you mention, at least the tech ones, are all way more open to third parties interfacing with whatever products they have or data they produce.
They are more like big city gangsters willing to do business with whomever as long as you pay them protection money, while Apple's ecosystem is like a gated community where you get shot at the door if you even so much as look like you can't afford to get in.
Do you have any examples of that? Facebook and Google seems open more in the roach motel sense - they get your customer volume but continually adjust the terms so you get less of the ad revenue (pivot to video, ad words’ declining payout, the need to pay for placement in search or adopt proprietary tools like AMP not to be pushed down the page, etc.).
Yes, I am not OP but obviously they are more anti-competitive if ONLY for their killing off support for progressive web apps over the last 3 or 17 releases of iOS/Safari
I'm a big fan of PWAs, but this really seems like small fries compared to something like Walmart which has an internal planned economy many times larger than the Soviet Union ever achieved.
If you sell your product in Walmart they basically own everything about it. They deem how you make your product, the supply chain, the prices you charge, everything
And they use this incredibly granular level of control to run out any possible competition
In a world where when Apple puts a dialogue on your phone, that when they try track you with ads, they ask "allow us to enhance your experience?" whereas when other companies try to track you, they ask "allow <company> to track you across apps and websites?"
In a world when you can't even hint at the existence of a payment mechanism outside the App Store to get subscriptions?
It's not the most anticompetitive but it's definitely competing for the title in big tech.
Indeed if we did apply that level of analysis to other companies, we might not have emded up depending on a one man dictatoship flush with concentration camps, ongoing genocide and war preparations for essentials like PPE and antibiotics.. imagine that.
> Mr. Kissinger should have mentioned that he left statesmanship with China for business with China. Nowhere does he discuss Kissinger Associates, the highly successful consulting firm he founded almost three decades ago, which does a thriving business providing entrée to Chinese officials and business leaders for foreign companies. Indeed, Mr. Kissinger has spent more time negotiating business than negotiating policy.
China has done a good job of hiring us leaders when they "retire to become rich consultants". You see the same thing in Germany of course with their old pm and Russia. This is how the despots curry favor and get the elites to go against what's good for the country. I don't know about recent Kissinger impacts, but you see it in germany getting too dependent on russian gas.
There's religious (Heavean's Gate, that recent kenyan cult), protest (self-immolating monks), media spectacle (Yukio Mishima), honor (seppuku, the samurai ritual mishima was immitating), shame (pompei), escape (L pills) fiancial ruin (1929 brokers), and fads (90s school shooters). Then there's suicide as a way of life (downtown SF, opioid epidemic).
The idea that this is all caused by "suffering" that could be prevented through increasingly sophiaticated treatmant plans or perhaps extended social welfare programs is a peculiar modern secular idea. I wonder if people who believe this sincerely are staving off their own suicide this way.