d/dBasketball

Relevant

Has anyone ever opened one of those books? For all we know, they could just be a bunch of blank pages on the inside

It seems like most of my friends are on addy, so… yes?

If you are saving for retirement, you should keep your savings in the market, which would make your $100 worth significantly more than in 2013

Emergency funds should be small enough that changes in value due to inflation over more than a decade cause negligible financial hardship

Surely there is a standardized economic metric for consumer purchasing power strictly for necessities as well. I assume this, because economists throw the best parties.

I mean, on the housing front (in the US at least), it has far more to do with the government backed 30 year mortgage (cheap money drives prices up) and zoning regulations (which constrain supply and also drive prices up).

Not how economics works. The price of gold fluxuates wildly because demand for it fluxuates wildly, because people keep gambling on the value of gold.

FOSS ponzi scheme

This is the best thing I’ve seen on the internet all week. A whole 8 days!

Ooh, size 30, a very standard size! How considerate. I always hate the size 25 screws, since the 30 doesnt quite fit, and then I have to dig around for my other bit

Also in 2005: a forum post about gingerbread recipies hijacked for a 20 page long debate about the existance of God

Ticketmaster’s real job isn’t selling tickets. It’s being the bad guy, so fans hate them instead of hating the band or venue.

Lemmy users have an irrational hatred for slightly-special characters.

Which makes complete sense, as most lemmy users are slightly special characters who hate themselves

I mean, I feel like you are weirdly close to my view. Incentives matter.

I’m not sure why you think that markets are inherently bad, though, or what incentive structure you think would be a better alternative.

Personally, my view is that markets are a naturally occurring phenomenon in any sufficiently large and complex human society, and if we try to design a society without them, we will simply create bad outcomes, like the rise of a wealthy and powerful criminal class.

My view is that, absent a better (and importantly, proven) structure, the best structure we have yet developed integrates markets into society in a pro-social manner. We allow legal markets, but create rules and guardrails to align incentives, so that the individual’s work benefits both themselves and society as a whole.

An analogy I like is that of a river. A completely unregulated river will ebb and flow, often help water your crops, and sometimes overflow its banks and flood your home. If you try to completely remove the river, it will not disappear - it will simply build up and overflow, causing greater floods, and depriving everyone of water. If you create a huge dam and completely control water flow, then the water will flow very consistently and you can avoid floods, but you will disrupt local water ecology, lose a lot of water to evaporation, and risk an enourmous calamity if the damn ever fails. A large dam might be the correct solution some of the time, but typically the best solution is to let the river flow mostly freely, while building small dams for water reservoirs and power generation and levees near population centers to protect against flooding. It is not just necessary but beneficial to let the river flow, but we must also protect society from its excesses.

So, too, with markets. They are going to happen, and they provide a lot of benefits to a lot of people. But the people and the government must be protected from its excesses. We can allow people to build and own a taco truck or a cement factory or a software product and make money on it, but we can create protections, incentives, and regulations so they don’t sell us toxic food, exploit workers, or buy elections and control politicians.

Well now we’ve just reinvented the victorian concept of a woman

Hey get a load of this loser! Interacting with the real world! Ha! Everyone laugh! Hahahaha!

cries in terminally online

SPIRAL OUT, KEEP GO-ING!

I did a quick google search and found this article. It seems like it is a conservative news source, so I am skeptical of the bent - but the facts seem to support my view:

Israeli Jewish parents and particularly mothers deserve recognition. Raising children requires sacrifice, patience, and devotion. These mothers achieve this with just 14 weeks of paid maternity leave per child—less than the OECD average of 19 weeks and far less than many European nations. Israeli mothers return to work earlier yet still have more children.

This growth comes overwhelmingly from those closest to Jewish traditional values. Haredi families lead with an average of over six children. Religious families have nearly four, and traditional Jews exceed the replacement rate with almost three children, while secular Israelis fall short with just two children. Those who preserve tradition are building the future.

The narrative I see here is that Israel has moderate support for families, and the reversal of birth rates is being driven by religious conservatives responding to a call to outcompete Palestinian birth rates. I’m open to other interpretations of the phenomenon from other sources, or your own interpretation of the article - but I feel like this matches up with my prior assumptions.

The driving force in low birth rates is emancipation and secularization of women. Providing more maternity leave, more child-rearing stipends, better health care, etc, simply won’t sway women who take a rational look at the process of birthing and raising children - destroying your body to be chained to a thankless responsibility for 18 years - and decide that they would rather have more money and free time instead. I will say my personal opinion on this descision is “that makes a lot of sense to me, good for you, snowboarding does sound a lot more fun than trying to control a child’s temper tantrum in a starbucks.” Of course, there are people on the margins, who would have a child if their economic conditions were better - but my feeling here is that this is a moving target. What counts as “ready” has less to do with actual physical needs, and more to do with being able to essentially keep up with the Joneses. Ie, the prospective secular mother wrings her hands, worrying that if her child can’t get into an Ivy League college then they will be miserable and so what is the point of giving them life in the first place? The religious mother, on the other hand, has absolute clarity (as reinforced weekly at her religious services) that motherhood is the greatest honor and responsibility she will have in her life, and that every life she gives birth to is a fantastic gift, regardless of how miserable it might be, and so gives birth while deeply in debt and living in a trailer park.

I have to say, this feels like a take that I’d like to see some evidence for. Because often those immigrants are coming from countries with essentially no social safety net and very regressive social customs. They have 7 kids because the mom was raised in a tight knit religious community where it was made very clear that her worth as a person was dependent on birthing and raising many children, and she carried that belief into adulthood. When these nations gain access to birth control, better education and autonomy for women, and more knowledge of the outside world, birth rates drop.

On the other hand, I have yet to hear of any developed nation successfully reversing declining birth rates via social welfare programs. I’m not saying that a properly executed program couldn’t work - I’m just saying I haven’t seen one yet.

If anything, based on the evidence I can see, we should expect the exact opposite effect. Welfare states will need to import population from more virile regressive states