Judged by whom?

Right, but if they keep talking while the other person is trying to talk, that’s rude.

I would think that if I wasn’t so certain that RFK Jr was actually a complete moron

Yeah, I mean, there is a solution. Liberalized zoning and Georgist tax policies. The problem is rarely that there is a lack of space to live - it is that that space is poorly utilized. And this is true because (1) it is illegal to build what people want where they want it in many places and (2) investors and homeowners speculate on land value without providing value to anyone else.

Rachel, who is in her 30s and lives in London, met her partner on the popular dating app Hinge, and was struck by his generosity. He insisted on buying her gifts and giving her cash to spend. She thought her now ex-partner was a “normal, decent guy”.

Yeah…

Yeah, on paper I’m a mgtow. After about 2 seconds I was like “wait, these people are losers.” Turns out I’m a relationship anarchist.

I stand corrected

I mean, it’s literally true. If they marry a citizen, they are legally entitled to stay.

No, because women can get their sexual needs more or less without trouble. A male sex robot owned by a woman would make me feel the same way though, similar to the man’s-arm-shaped pillows. It is sad, because they can’t get a their emotional needs for intimacy fulfilled and are resorting to hollow physical proxies

No. But you are an extreme minority, and your existence won’t change overall cultural views of sex robots.

Then for people who are struggling & can’t afford to produce one “high value” child they make a logical choice to do it later when they have more resources. Since humans are complicated they can create other values they see are more valuable then children or decide to do something later until having children is no longer a possibility.

In your language, we would expect people in the first sentence to revert to K type parents. If they do not, they simply fall into the category described by your second sentence.

And in rich countries, who are the people still having many children? The poor, uneducated, rural, religious/conservative segments of the population, who believe in some way or another that raising a child struggling in poverty is preferable to not having children at all.

Sounds like a pretty big cope. Sex isn’t about cumming. It’s about emotional connection with another human being. Being unable to get fulfillment of this basic human need is sad and lonely. This is why fleshlights have a stigma that beating your bishop the old fashioned way doesn’t - every healthy teenaged boy spanks it on the reg. But actually purchasing a device speaks to a level of hopelessness at obtaining actual sex that is sad, which implies a failure to be attractive, which is itself unattractive.

If that were true, we would expect richer countries to have higher birth rates. Instead, we see roughly the opposite trend. The richer a country gets, typically, the lower the birth rate. You can’t tell me that a teacher and a data entry clerk in Virginia are less economically capable of raising children than subsistence farmers in Malawi, no matter how high the rent in Virginia is.

If you want to see high income places with high birth rates, then you end up in very traditional/religious cultures, like Mormons and the Arab petro-states, where women face extremely high cultural pressure (if not force/violence) to be child-bearers.

I’d really like to see the evidence for this statement, since it really seems like this trend is just an extension of the phenomenon we see in poorer countries: when you give women education, opportunities, and birth control, fewer of them will have children. It stands to reason that the more education, the more opportunities available, and the more freely accessible birth control is, the fewer women will have children.

Me, but I have no dogs and don’t play video games.

You would be categorized in the study as “childless” - wanting children but being unable to have them - and thus would not be part of the headline statistic.

I mean, why would anyone want to live in Venezuela as a life choice? Typically, those who would really like to leave don’t have the means to, and those who have the means to leave don’t have a real reason to. This current shake up is concerning, but you have to also understand that most people’s lives don’t revolve around the actions of the federal government. They revolve around the social connections they’ve made, the physical things they own or have built, and the places that they know and call home. Leaving means losing all of those things. And my perspective, as a blue tribe member in the US, is that most of my friends are watching this unfold with a worried grimace, but with an assumption that we’ll oust the dumbass from office in the next election and begin the work of rebuilding what he broke. In the meantime, they are worried about raising their kids, fixing up their houses, building their businesses or advancing in their careers, going on dates and finding partners, staying fit and healthy, and all the other things people really tend to spend their time thinking about.