If this is a federal holiday to “center blackness” and “put our attention on black folk”, then that’s state sanctioned racial factionalism and perpetuates an arrogant race centrism that’s already all too prevalent among some segments of black Americans. That I will not celebrate.

We should be creating a society that celebrates Americans, regardless of their skin color. Emancipation day is a great thing, over half a million Americans (many white) died to correct an evil that denied freedom to millions of our fellow Americans - it’s a tragedy so many had to die, but their sacrifice made a better country for all of us.

We’ve never had more pampered living conditions.

If the only economy in which people decide to have kids is the rarefied air of America in the 1950s when min wage could afford a home, then that’s far too narrow of living conditions for a species to propagate.

The reality is humans have always been costly, but people had them anyways for unintended + cultural reasons. When you have a child, they’re a massive productivity loss for 5+ years, so even subsistence farmer humans or hunter gatherer humans found them incredibly costly.

And the people today making great salaries in major cities could easily afford multiple kids while still being comfortable, but their lifestyle would be more modest than otherwise. People far poorer have far more children.

I could personally afford kids and I’m slightly above median household income as my wife is starting her own business. I don’t have them though, because there’s more I want to push to accomplish. That’s a very common sentiment, and it’s more to do with cultural priorities than economics.

Look at charts of birth rates in any country. Easy enough to google.

Look at the decline and when it declines.

There was a decline due to the global recession, yes. This pales in comparison to the decline that came precipitously decades earlier.

It’s: birth control and family planning.

Look at birth rates in: the US, the UK, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea…now overlay it with when birth control became widely legal and family planning initiatives took off.

Look at countries that continue to have high birth rates and how they treat birth control/family planning.

Look at communities that continue to have high birth rates: the poor, the religious, the Amish.

Even today, something like 50% of births in the US are unintended or mistimed. Imagine what the birth rate would be with even MORE access to birth control.

Fact is: humans procreate by and large unintentionally. It’s enough to evolve a desire for sex, and the babies follow. When you introduce technology that severs this connection, you expose the shortcuts nature took all along.

If we want to fix this in the short term, it’s not clear how to do it. We can’t uninvent birth control, and heavily restricting it would be very unpopular and likely impossible. Baby stipends don’t seem to cut it.

In the long run, this fixes itself. Cultures, sociological conditions, genetics that result in more children will proliferate and the others will die out.

The future is either babies in incubators, or it’s Mormon. Maybe both.

Note that almost every exchange outside the US has been flat or negative for decades. The US has held a precious position for a few generations that’s made “chart go up” feel like a given

Sure, buying Just Salad is more expensive than buying McDonald’s, but that’s not the only options.

The bigger problem IMO: we put way more sugar, sweeteners, and addictive substances in food and have big portions where people feel obligated to finish. It’s very easy to eat 100g of sugar every day and hardly notice. Combine that with most American activities involving food and alcohol.

We have a culture that encourages eating and food that responds by being more eatable

We all gotta wash our butts, but it just seems more civilized to do it in the shower as you can get everything clean, you didn’t just crap, and you’re not eating with those same hands immediately afterwards.

Toilet paper + wet wipes are 100x more sanitary than what you describe

Not because money is some sacred object, but because money changes hands when you’re doing work for others. Money is just a lubricant that allows you to contribute your work to society and society to contribute to you in a generalized way rather than a village system where everyone returns the favor in kind.

Imagine we’re in a village, I’m a farmer, youre a tailor. If you want to get fed, you have to either grow your own food or you have to trade clothes to me the farmer because I’m the only one who can trade food back. As soon as you’ve traded with the farmers and we’re all set on clothes, now how are you going to eat? The result is everyone has to be a self sufficient subsistence farmer and only a few non farmers can be supported.

Money just abstracts that labor. It keeps the score on how much you created value for others and people pay you money that they received from the value they provided others.

Work you do for money is work you did for someone else. Picking up your groceries didn’t contribute to anyone else. It’s certainly necessary, nothing morally wrong with it, but society generally should be organized to incentivize contributing to society

His successes minus his failures still far and away surpass your abilities in this area (deal making). Any argument that rests on “Donald Trump is not doing a good job at negotiating here” is suspect by default

From her account: there’s no indication that he was being rude, only that she felt he didn’t provide her preferred amount of solemnity. If it were anyone else there’d be nothing to conclude. If it’s Elon Musk, it’s devastating proof of sociopathy

The Holocaust was a tragedy. For the vast majority of people, it’s a very distant, remote, almost abstract tragedy. It happened generations ago thousands of miles away from most Americans, in a world entirely different from ours. Did she expect him to break down crying? And that he didn’t is just confirmation that he’s indifferent to dead Jewish people?

This is not meant to be a defense of Elon per se, but just of the general attitude that Jewish people deserve unique deference. He didn’t even visit the site of the Holomodor yet when he criticizes Ukraine there’s no impression that he’s anti Ukrainian (because these are entirely unrelated).