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I was one of those students initially but then came to appreciate the beauty in the science and nature of computation. I always tell people that computer science is not about programming -- its about studying the dynamics of problems in nature.

Unfortunately, I realized this a little late, and it wasn't until towards the end of my final year when I started appreciating these courses. I long for a day I can return to studying these topics.


> Most teams don't fail because they picked the wrong framework. They fail because they picked too much framework. HTMX is a bet on simplicity, and simplicity tends to win over time.

I've built enough stuff in my time to know this is hyperbole at best and an outright lie at worst. I've never seen a team fail due to complexity. Team fails because the thing they built was wrong.

You should spend 99% of your time paranoid that the thing you're building is useful enough to justify its existence. Whatever tool you use along the way makes up the last 1%


In some ways, that’s what MCP interfaces are kind of for. It just takes one extra step to add the mcp url and go through oauth.

I assume the fall off there will be 99% of users though, the way it works today.

But this theoretically allows multiple applications to plugin into ChatGPT/claude/gemini and work together.

If someone adds zillow and… vanguard, your LLM can call both through mcp and help you plan a home buy


https://canine.sh - makes it dead simple to turn your Kubernetes environment into a Heroku like PaaS.

Mainly used in organizations with developers who want to deploy to a corporate Kubernetes environment, but don’t want to deal with the complexities.

It’s fully open source so we’re covered by sponsors, the largest being Portainer $5k+ / m from sponsorships.

Makes it possible to keep the cloud offering totally free.


Is canine for kubernetes as coolify is for docker? Lovely!

You know what, that’s a better way to describe it than I’ve ever been able to come up with!

API Reference returns a 404 btw

https://docs.canine.sh/swagger/page.html


Yeah, it’s currently https://canine.sh/api-docs

Been trying to find time to fix the issue on the other side


Holy cow! That’s exactly what I’ve been looking for my homelab.

Give me a shout if you need help setting it up!

On the discord, or chris@ canine<dot>sh


Haven’t their prices stayed at $20/m for a while now?

They've published anticipated price increases over coming years. Prices will rise dramatically and steadily to meet revenue targets.

AI doesn’t have much of a moat. People can and will easily switch providers.

Sure but there are only a couple leading providers worth considering for coding at least, and there will be consolidation once investment pulls back. They may find a way to collude on raising prices.

Where switching will be easier is with casual chat users plus API consumers that are already using substandard models for cost efficiency. But there will also always be a market for state of art quality.


Reinforced today:

As Gemini has gained competitiveness (higher confidence in its output, better reputation), its prices have steadily risen


Working on https://canine.sh, an open source, self hosted PaaS for Kubernetes.

A big part of this was inspired by the last startup I worked at. In an effort to not deal with complexities of Kubernetes, we ended up on Heroku and was charged exorbitant amounts of money. One year spending close to 400k on Heroku alone, for what should’ve been 10-15k in cloud costs.

I think a big part of this is just making Kubernetes more friendly and easier to use for a small / midsized team of developers.

The goal is to make it easy enough for even a single developer to feel comfortable with, while also being powerful enough to be able to support a small team


I see that your app/tool is linked on Portainer's website. What's the business model behind it ? I do not see any pricing and I could be really interested as I'm looking for a solution to abstract away k8s complexity for a medium sized company I'm working for.

Yeah it’s totally free to use and there are pricing tiers for support that portainer provides. Canine is 100% FOSS. No hidden features behind some payment plan or anything.

Portainer sponsors us, to keep us working full time on it.

Shoot me a note at chris @ canine<dot>sh

Would love to help in any way I can! Always looking for more adoption, esp at medium sized companies


I am totally on the other end of the spectrum. For $20 a month, the amount of value I get from ChatGPT is incredible. I can talk to it in voice mode to help brainstorm ideas, it teaches me about different subjects, it (+ claude code) helps me write boilerplate code so I can spend more time doing things I enjoy.

I'm going through the process of buying a home, and the amount of help its given is incredible. Analyzing disclosures, loan estimates, etc. Our accountant charges $200 an hour to basically confirm all the same facts that ChatGPT already gave us. We can go into those meetings prepped with 3 different scenarios that ChatGPT already outlined, and all they have to do is confirm.

Its true that its not always correct, but, I've also had paid specialists like real estate agents and accountants give me incorrect information, at the cost of days of scheduling, and hundreds of dollars. They also aren't willing to answer questions at 2am in the morning.


> For $20 a month, the amount of value I get from ChatGPT is incredible.

I agree. Wait until it's $249 a month. You'll feel differently.


At $249/month the market adoption will crash resulting in somewhere in the middle pricing that the market can bear

Competition and local SLMs will also provide a counter to massive price increase


> At $249/month the market adoption will crash resulting in somewhere in the middle pricing that the market can bear

Or much like what is going to happen with Alexa, it just dies because the cost of the service is never going to align with “what the market can bear”. Even at $75/mo, the average person will probably stop being lazy and just go back to doing 10 minutes worth of searching to find answers to basic questions.


This is what I believe will happen. Once pricing is raised to sustainable levels (regardless of profit) I think the customer base will drop off.


That is also a possibility


Even for 500 a month, it's still a lot of value, especially for companies, if two guys with a subscription can replace one person. It's worth it


For what its worth, I already pay 20 for Chatgpt + 100 / month for Claude Code.


Well in some areas, the professionals are on the hook if they are incorrect, ChatGPT is not.


I learned today there are people who upload personal information to chatbots


I feel like I can get all of that for free already. Not sure why I would pay a monthly subscription when I'm already getting Gemini across the Google ecosystem.


Yeah the premise of the comment is that at some point prices will have to raised, and when that happens, if people will churn


Lol what. Analyzing disclosures? What information of use could it possibly synthesize from a three column table with checkmarks in [no disclosure]? For your sake I sincerely hope you aren't using ChatGPT when you should be getting inspections.


Unfortunately in SF at the moment, it seems basically all competitive offers need to waive inspection. Which is also what we did

The sellers already had an inspection done. The full report is over 100 pages


Who told you to waive inspection?


Inspections are fairly worthless if you are remotely handy and competent at basic stuff. I don’t need someone to go through and catalog the make and models of all the appliances, and I can visually inspect my own water heater and furnace pretty trivially.

You can get “real” inspections done but they cost thousands of dollars and take a full or more day to do with multiple subject matter experts. Almost no one does this.

Waiving inspection other than for major material defect is what I’ve done for all my real estate transactions. I’m not putting in an offer to nickel and dime someone over trivial bullshit like a busted GFCI circuit. My offer simply accounts for the trivial odds and ends I’ll have to take care of. Plus I’d much rather get the work done myself since I don’t trust a seller to do anything but the bare minimum.

Every one of my friends who have had five figures or more of surprise repair work on homes they purchased all had an inspection done. None of those could have found the various hidden damages for those buildings short of destructive stuff like pulling drywall out or lifting up shingles from a roof. Don’t worry though, the inspectors found stuff like a bathroom faucet with a crack in the knob.


Waiving inspection is waiving seller liability, you know that right?


Liability for what? The only real liability in my state is for outright misrepresentation or fraud via failing to disclose. The disclosure form covers anything material I'd care about. Even then - good luck actually proving anything short of exceptional circumstances.

If you look at the standard offer document for waiving inspection it's pretty easy to walk it back. You're simply waiving a contingency - you can typically still inspect the property itself. I'm sure if you get way off the beaten path you are correct, but almost no one is engaging in totally non-standard contracts where I'm at.

I'm curious what liability you think would apply for an inspection that misses whatever it may be that ends up in dispute after the transaction closes - since the whole point in the inspection is finding that beforehand? If I find a material defect in the foundation after I close - it won't matter if I had an inspection or not. Unless I can prove the seller knew about it and failed to disclose.

And if I ever sell any properties - I will be pretty loath to sell to anyone demanding an inspection contingency. They are almost always used for nickel and dime BS that I really don't have time for. If you walk the place, get your inspector to do so too, and come up with a punch list and still want to make an offer, discount it appropriately and fix it yourself after you close. It's nearly always either pointless or used as a negotiation tool after the fact due to the fact buyers can expect a seller to not want to walk away from the middle of a transaction (sunk cost/time). I'd much rather take an offer at 5% less up-front than deal with someone wasting 30-45 days on the market and my time dealing with trivial items.


Seller inspectors are notorious for missing important things.

Waiving inspections means even if they do, they’re not on the hook anymore.


>The disclosure form covers anything material I'd care about. Even then - good luck actually proving anything short of exceptional circumstances.

Which is why you get an inspection.


The market.


That's a bubble.


Indeed, but it can remain grossly overinflated longer than most buyers are willing to wait for it to pop.


I think its worth discounting against the failure rates of humans also.

> Depending on the context, and how picky you need to be about recognizing good or bad output, this might be anywhere from a 60% to a 95% success rate, with the remaining 5%-40% being bad results. This just isn't good enough for most practical purposes

This seems to suggest that humans are 100%. I'd be surprised if i was anywhere close to that after 10 years of programming professionally


One thing that I’ve been trying to understand about this discourse:

Is the sum of the increase in costs some people are now paying greater than the subsidies that previously existed?

In other words: was there always a massive bill to be paid here, but it was just previously socialized and hidden in the form of taxes/ public debt? Or does the act of subsidizing it actually decrease the total?


Yes to both. High costs were previously partly hidden by subsidies for some consumers purchasing individual or family policies on state ACA exchanges, and now many of them will be forced to pay something closer to the true market price. But just like with college tuition, when the government throws money at a problem that ends up causing costs to explode without permanently improving affordability.


> true market price

There can be no market clearing price, because healthcare demand is unlimited.

In some countries supply is rationed by using different means such as waiting lists, budgets for funding, or even corruption (I witnessed this in Cuba).


> because healthcare demand is unlimited.

How's that? Beyond some level of care I suspect demand drops of a cliff. No one goes to the doctor for the fun of it.


I'm sure they're talking about necessary healthcare - e.g., cancer drugs, insulin, dialysis, heart surgery, etc.

When giving the option of parting ways with some more money or dying, virtually no one is going to choose the latter.

Unfortunately, the US healthcare system is set up to extract maximum capital from people who interact with it. Worse: it's not alone. For example, the reason food in the US has so much sugar, salt, and fat in it is that the food industry has carefully engineered processed foods to be more addictive so people will buy more of it.

We live in one of the most exploitative societies in the world, and it's only getting worse over time.


> No one goes to the doctor for the fun of it.

"Fun" isn't the right word, but ~hypochondriacs will get unnecessary care if they perceive it to be free. This adds cost to the system without improving outcomes.


Yes, and there is also an enormous amount of low-value or unnecessary care delivered which also doesn't improve outcomes (or even makes them worse). Depending on which estimate you believe this might be a quarter of all healthcare spending.


Better answer (and child comment too):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46115687


There's a third piece too, which is that insurers are ramping price much faster than inflation. Our (unsubsidized) premiums increased 20% year-over-year, after also increasing faster than the rate of inflation the last few years.

Since premiums never decrease, one can pretty easily plot out that in the next ~decade we will see family premiums larger than the median salary. The economics of all this are going to get very weird in the near future.


That's all true, but insurers are ramping up premiums faster than inflation largely because providers have raised their prices, and utilization has greatly increased due to an aging sicker population. The ACA minimum medical loss ratio means that health plans profits aren't increasing much.


Percentage wise profits might not increase, but 10% profits on a $2000 plan make an insurance company (and execs) more than 10% profits on a $200 plan. It's in their interests and income stream for costs to constantly go up so they can get their 10% take. Efficiencies and price savings would actually hurt them (can't have plan rates go back down and only get their 10% off of $200).


That ignores competitive pressures. Commercial health plans aggressively negotiate rates with their network providers in order to get market share with cost sensitive customers. If your claim was accurate then insurers would just take whatever rates that providers set but the reality is that doesn't happen. Health plans routinely drop more expensive providers from their networks.


Rental companies have incentives to get market share with cost sensitive customers too. They would totally never have a system (or use colluding software) where everyones rates just go up.

Fun fact, people in fact can't just 'do without' for housing/medical care, so can't act in a manner that keeps the market in check. Therefor neither of those two segments can be treated as actual markets, or expect the typical benefits of actual, working markets.


> Rental companies have incentives to get market share with cost sensitive customers too. They would totally never have a system (or use colluding software) where everyones rates just go up.

If you're talking about RealPage, the actual effect it had was putting more units on the market and lowering rents, not raising them.


I'm surprised so many people miss this. The insurers have an incentive for medical costs to go up, so that their (capped) share results in higher profits.


But isn't it insurers actually set how much a service is going to cost you and then make "a discount" on that figure?


Yes and no.

What happens in practice is that a provider charges $200 for "distributing Advil" and $50 for two pills. Then the insurance company, whose legally allowed profit is proportional to payouts, "negotiates" the price down to $150 total and claims to the person "we saved you $100". Then their accountant says "we paid out $150, so we get a profit margin of $40" (instead of the $0.50 they would get with a real at-cost charge).

But the price is made up nonsense and 100x actual cost for 15 seconds handing a 1¢ pill over. Which is why asking for an itemized receipt and saying you can't afford that suddenly drops the bill to $1.50.

When providers don't "play ball" with the price fixing the way insurance company wants, they go off network.


Medicaid and Medicare set service rates by fiat, which is why many providers don't accept patients on those plans. Commercial health plans have to negotiate service rates with their network providers. There's no discount as such: if you receive service from a network provider then they have to charge the negotiated rate.


Insurer premiums are capped and rise with costs. To the extent they're rising faster than inflation, that is only possible because their costs are rising faster than inflation. Costs are rising in large part for demographic reasons -- boomers are getting older.


Year-over-year increase in GDP in the U.S. right now is almost exclusively “production” output from the healthcare industry, whose profits are stratospheric and rising. So there’s two useful datapoints here: first, the bill must be paid, or U.S. GDP growth year-over-year falters, not because healthcare costs this much; and second, household debt continues to increase year-over-year to permit continued wage stagnation. Whether insurers end up lowering their profits (and thus prices) as the subsidy expires centers around whether banks extend further debt as a household wages subsidy. As of right now, that seems to be continuing, even though some of that debt market is in the midst of a small crash, so insurers (who have no regulatory limits on profit levels) are unlikely to lower their profit targets as subsidies end.

So long as the political will of U.S. leadership supports that continued profit, and either government and/or banks subsidize worker wages to cover the increased profits, then we’ll continue seeing growth in costs on paper before subsidies. This growth in profits/prices could not be sustained on wages alone, given the continuing decline of inflation-adjusted worker earnings; and so to answer your question, yes: the act of subsidizing is what’s enabling the prices being charged; but, no: the costs of providing healthcare to any one person of a given age are not increasing due to subsidies; just the profits.


Commercial health insurers have relatively low profit margins. This is forced by the ACA minimum medical loss ratio. In theory Congress could increase that ratio slightly but it wouldn't do much to improve affordability for consumers.


That restriction is mysteriously absent from the actual published data showing their revenue growth rate spiking sharply when ACA was passed. There’s lots of sources for that data, but I liked this chart for its simplicity:

https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/111...

It presents nice easy datapoints: Cigna raised its profits by $40B/yr, an increase of 400% of its pre-subsidy profits, in just a decade — and one can safely assume that now that they’re accustomed to the new profit levels, there is no way they’ll voluntarily give them up. Whatever was intended with the medical loss ratio, Congress fucked up by not including a simple dollars-per-subscriber cap on net revenue.


The subsidies are going down, but the base price of the plans are going way up. The plan I'm on increased from $800/month to $1150/month next year, and that is a modest increase compared to most others I've heard about. I'm switching to a maybe cheaper plan - if I use less healthcare, but if I use too much it will be more expensive due to much higher deductibles.

Insurers haven't really explained why the base prices of plans are going up so much. Perhaps GLP-1 drugs but that doesn't seem like enough (those drugs often aren't covered by ACA plans anyway due to their brand-name status). It could be a delayed effect from all the inflation a couple years ago - health care contracts are negotiated on the order of years, and a bunch could have just been renegotiated to reflect current market prices.


Yes, sort of.

ACA insurers are required to pay out N% of their premiums. This means that a really important way of keeping premiums down is to make sure that people who use less medical care are in the insured pool. But if somebody is looking at a $20,000 annual bill in premiums and is generally healthy they might look elsewhere than the ACA markets or just simply go uninsured. That person leaving the insured pool means that everybody else's premiums go up.

The ACA had two strategies to keep these people in the pool: the individual mandate and the subsidies trying to keep prices lower. The mandate was removed years ago. And while we still have subsidies below 400% FPL, the ones for people above 400% FPL are gone. A self-employed person making $75,000 annually who previously could afford insurance might now be looking at alternatives.


For what its worth, the Economist recently wrote about how universal child care can harm children, citing a study from Quebec.

> The trio published their first study in 2005, and the results were damning. Shifting to universal child care appeared to lead to a rise in aggression, anxiety and hyperactivity among Quebecer children, as well as a fall in motor and social skills. The effects were large: anxiety rates doubled; roughly a third more kids were reported to be hyperactive. Indeed, the difference in hyperactivity rates was larger than is typically reported between boys and girls.

They basically make the case that childcare is extremely difficult and requires a lot of attentive care, which is hard to scale up in a universal way.

[1] https://archive.is/ScFRX


In Norway every child has a right to a barnehage place (kindergarten). It's not free unless you are poor but it is very affordable at a maximum of about 3 000 NOK per month, about 300 USD, for five full days a week.

Children in barnehage learn to be social and cooperative, resilient and adaptable. They play outside in all weathers, learn to put on and take off their outer clothes, to set tables, help each other and the staff. They certainly do not fail to gain motor skills. It's not just child care and every barnehage has to be led by someone with a qualification in early childhood education although no formal class based instruction takes place.

So what exactly is New Mexico proposing to provide and what did Quebec provide?


> So what exactly is New Mexico proposing to provide and what did Quebec provide?

I do not know specifically. But I surmise, culture.

The things we value, culturally, make themselves apparent


$300 USD per month sounds insanely expensive


You should talk to some people with kids then. I can't find the source, but I think the US national average is something like $1500/month for <40 hour/wk daycare. That doesn't account for child-to-sitter ratio differences, or cost of living differences either. A few different friends around the country, not in big cities, have cited >$5K/month as the cheapest they can find for full time daycare. It's significant enough that families with multiple children are often cited as being unable to have both parents with careers, because the cost of childcare far exceeds what one of them can make in their career. To be fair, this makes some sense, you're effectively paying for a portion of a child care professionals career, plus the shared overhead for facilities and supplies. If you have a decent (<8 children per professional) ratio and have 2-3 kids needing daycare, you're paying for 25-30% of someone's direct salary, plus overhead. Very few people make so much more than a trained professional that they could afford to shell out that much.


It's actually cheaper now. the numbers I quote were from when my children were in barnehage many years ago. But remember that is the maximum one would pay, it's graduated according to your income. The rule now is not more than 6% of household income and not more than about 130 USD per month. Also remember that this is eight or more hours per day five days a week in a facility that doesn't only look after your children but also teaches them how to be independent, resilient, social, etc.

Could you get private child care for 300 USD per month?


Pre-school nurseries in my area typically charge around £100 ($132) per day.


i just got quoted 300/wk for 2-day daycare


Norway accepts they are a homogeneous country. Americans lose their minds at the thought


What do you mean?


[flagged]


The US isn’t homogenous country. It can’t become that without amending the constitution and then deporting or killing 40% of the population.

Honestly, opinions like this are the best anti-white propaganda around.


I know higher order functions are cool and all, but using (apply ...) makes nested applications easier to notice.


FTA

> Think of the Perry and Quebec experiments—two of the most widely cited in the early-education literature—as poles at either end of a spectrum

Even The Economist acknowledges that its a single study in a single province which runs contradictory to other studies. That they turn that into headline article says more about The Economist and readers of The Economist than it does about universal child care.


> the Economist recently wrote about how universal child care can harm children

I expect nothing less from the Economist, of course.

If you read more closely, the issue wasn't that universal child care is bad, but how it's implemented is important (of course). Not to mention that a host of other factors could be contributing to the study's findings. For example, it could be that mothers spending less time with their children is detrimental to their development. Few people would argue with that. But let's examine why mothers are working full-time in the first place -- largely it's because families can no longer be sustained on a single income. And _that_ is more likely the root of the problem than "universal childcare".


The problem is that the word ‘childcare’ can mean anything from a one on one nanny looking after a child to an after school club where it’s just one adult and the kids just do whatever they want with no guidance at all.

You can’t really compare them without a better definition.


This is probably because they are actually measuring hyperactivity when there is universal care versus 40% of it going unmeasured.


I suspect that if the sample pre universal care was big enough, then the measurement of 40% is still good.


Not if the samples are skewed. For example, the people who get the care are from stable environments with financial means. After universal childcare is implemented, we start measuring these things in the broader population that has fewer access to resources generally.


The assumption here is that only people with means got care and were surveyed. I am not sure that this is the case. Moreover, you can correct for those factors, and, I assume, any statistician worth their salt are.


Given the reproducibility crisis, particularly in the social sciences, I wouldn’t put too much weight into the skill or honesty of the people doing that work (and statisticians they are not - more like people with a humanities background who take some statistics courses and then do numerology)


Even if you assume the statistics for hyperactivity are correct, how did the researchers decide which statistics were relevant?

In any case, the original 2008 publication is at https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w11832/w118... . That's long enough ago that we can read how academics interpret the study.

For example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088520062... attributes the problems to the increased used of lower-quality for-profit and unlicensed providers:

"To address the growing demand for ECEC spaces as the cost of care went down, the province saw an expansion of both for-profit and unlicensed home care providers. Data from the aforementioned longitudinal study indicated that 35 % of center-based settings and 29 % of home-based settings were rated as “good” or better quality, compared to only 14 % of for-profit centers and 10 % of unlicensed home care providers. Furthermore, for-profit and unlicensed home care settings were more likely to be rated as “inadequate” than their licensed counterparts (Japel et al., 2005; Japel, 2012; Bigras et al., 2010). At the same time, Quebec experienced a decline across various child health, developmental, and behavioral outcomes, including heightened hyperactivity, inattention, and physical aggression, along with reduced motor and social development (Baker et al., 2008; Kottelenberg & Lehrer, 2013). These findings underscore the challenges of maintaining high standards in the context of expansion associated with rapid reduction in the cost of ECEC."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/19345747.2023.21... also affirms the importance of quality

"Meta-analyses have, quite consistently, shown targeted preschool programs—for 3 to 4-year-old children—to be effective in promoting preschool cognitive skills in the short run, with effect sizes averaging around 20–30% of a standard deviation (Camilli et al., 2010; Duncan & Magnuson, 2013). There is also some meta-analytic evidence of persistent effects throughout adolescence and early adulthood on outcomes such as grade retention and special education placement (McCoy et al., 2017). The same is true for universal preschool programs in cases where structural quality is high (i.e., high teacher: child ratios, educational requirements for teachers), with effects evident primarily among children from families with lower income and/or parental education (van Huizen & Plantenga, 2018).

There are, however, notable exceptions. Most prominent are quasi-experimental studies of Quebec’s scale-up of universal ECEC subsidies (Baker et al., 2008; Baker et al., 2019; Kottelenberg & Lehrer, 2017), covering children aged 0–4. These studies found mixed short- and long-term effects on cognitive- and academic outcomes (for example, negative effects of about 20% of a standard deviation of program exposure on a Canadian national test in math and reading for ages 13 and 16, yet with positive effects of about 10–30% for PISA math and reading scores; Baker et al., 2019). Consistent with effects of universal ECEC being conditional on quality ..."

The van Huizen & Plantenga citation at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727... has bullet points "The results show that ECEC quality matters critically.", "The evidence does not indicate that effects are fading out in the long run." and "The gains of ECEC are concentrated within children from lower SES families." In more detail it also cites Baker et al 2008, with:

"In fact, the research estimating the causal effects of universal programs is far from conclusive: some studies find that participation in ECEC improves child development (Drange and Havnes, 2015, Gormley, Gayer, Phillips and Dawson, 2005), while others show that ECEC has no significant impact (Blanden, Del Bono, Hansen and Rabe, 2017, Fitzpatrick, 2008) or may produce adverse effects on children's outcomes (Baker, Gruber and Milligan, 2008, Baker, Gruber and Milligan, 2015). As societal returns depend critically on the effects on children's outcomes (e.g. van Huizen, Dumhs, & Plantenga, 2018), universal child care and preschool expansions may in some cases be considered as a promising but in other cases as a costly and ineffective policy strategy."


I take the fact that child care is not some kind of super new thing and exists in well run countries without their kids being behind, worst behaved or more aggressive then American kids.


You may be surprised to learn that Quebec is not in America.


America is the place without universal childcare being used as a control here.


I am reading the article and it looks like it is being compared to the elder cohorts of Qubec children and also rest of Canada.

Looks like Quebec's past and rest of Canada is the control.


I'm referring to the comment you responded to comparing america to various countries that offer free childcare.


It's not an intractable issue. It's just a matter of economics.


Agreed. If we could fund universal child care so that the ratio of caregiver to child was more like 1 to 2 or 1 to 5 or even 1 to 8 in extreme cases, then the lack of attentiveness would not be a problem.

Wait a minute… that sounds like…


That sounds like the ideal situation we have decided to make unrealistic.


> Wait a minute… that sounds like…

The child tax credit.


Okay but you do understand that what you're suggesting costs the full salary a woman (because of course it would never be men asked give up their careers) could earn for the family and the economic gains that come with it. Back of the napkin calculation is three trillion dollars of value lost annually. And that's before the knock-on effects of such a massive recession. Household income will drop by 30-40% across the board because you're daft if you think men will be getting a raise. So there goes the demand side too.

Then there's the small issue that women's liberation happened and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't happen again given the conditions would be the exact same. Women won't be put back into financial captivity without a fight. In some ways I understand why men idealize this era of the past, but women were not having a good time.


It doesn't cost the fully salary of the woman, it redirects it to something that can't be captured by large scale economics. Which, if you're trying to break the backs of the uber wealthy, is an excellent way to do it.

> Women won't be put back into financial captivity without a fight

This, along with the language of the supposedly "pro-male" camp ("why shackle yourself to someone who will just rough you over for most of your paycheck later and leave") are both approaching marriage wrong. If you're trying to achieve a good that cannot be had individually (a happy marriage) then both sides have to freely give 100% of what the shared good requires. Marriage cannot work as a Mexican standoff between two parties who are trying to take as much as possible from it without giving anything in return.

Dangerous? Yes. It's the most dangerous thing you can ever do, to take yourself in your own hands and offer yourself to another.


You go first then. It can be a you cut I choose type thing with gender roles.

Because let me tell you dude I and every other woman is picking the men's package in this deal. You go ahead and be a 50's housewife if you think it's so good. We've had the option to choose if we want that terrible life for 40+ years now and "fuck no" won in a landslide.

Do you know how depressing it is to find out that both my mom and my mother-in-law squirreled away money in a secret bank account just so they could have the tiniest bit of financial independence separate from their husbands. And keep in mind these are men who they both love dearly and are still married to to this day.


Hold on - you're conflating "traditional housewife with zero financial independence" with "choosing to be the primary caregiver for your own kids." Those are not the same thing.

The fact that your mom and MIL needed secret bank accounts isn't an argument against raising your own children - it's an argument for financial transparency and shared accounts in modern marriages. And yeah, we should absolutely have that.

But here's what you're missing: plenty of women (and men!) are choosing to be primary caregivers today because we have the choice now. It's not 1950 - it's 2025. Nobody's talking about giving up bank accounts or financial independence. We're talking about prioritizing raising your own kids over outsourcing it, when that's financially possible.

It's hard as hell, it's undervalued, and it's not for everyone. But acting like everyone who makes that choice is deluded? That's just as dismissive as the people who think all women should be doing it.


Since women’s lib, men’s wages have been flat while women’s has climbed. See the first chart here: https://www.businessinsider.com/gender-wage-pay-gap-charts-2...

The conclusion is that adding women to the workforce competed with men’s wages at least as much as it did add to the economy. Taking women out of the workforce to do family and domestic tasks will be supportive of male wages, counteracting the effect you mention.


>Okay but you do understand that what you're suggesting costs the full salary a woman (because of course it would never be men asked give up their careers) could earn for the family and the economic gains that come with it.

Women do not generally want men to stay at home and take care of kids. Women also demand that men make more money than themselves. For women, the period between the kids being born and going to school full-time is like a kind of sabbatical. If they're lucky enough to be able to not work a job during that period, that is.

>Back of the napkin calculation is three trillion dollars of value lost annually. And that's before the knock-on effects of such a massive recession.

That sounds absurdly high. I think you need to revisit your calculations. Even if it was the real number, perpetuating the species is worth more than corporate bullshit meetings or whatever.

>Then there's the small issue that women's liberation happened and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't happen again given the conditions would be the exact same. Women won't be put back into financial captivity without a fight. In some ways I understand why men idealize this era of the past, but women were not having a good time.

There were some unfortunate circumstances in the past but they are way overblown. Most people with a little sense know that it would be preferable to be able to live on one income, and that men and women alike wish for that kind of prosperity to return. It might come along with occasional problems, but what we face now with ever-increasing costs of living and awkward questions about finances and family roles is not great either.


> Women do not generally want men to stay at home and take care of kids. Women also demand that men make more money than themselves. For women, the period between the kids being born and going to school full-time is like a kind of sabbatical.

Domestic labor and being primary caregiver for children is not, in any way, like a sabbatical.


It actually is like a sabbatical, especially with all the modern conveniences of appliances and cars. When I hear women whine about domestic labor I have to mention that single men and women do practically the same labor, for themselves alone, and washing clothes or cooking is much easier to do for multiple people than for one person. It isn't 3x as much work to keep house for 3+ people as it is to keep house for 1. Women who stay home for kids invariably watch lots of TV and maybe do three hours of actual recognizable work per day max. I'm sure there are some who insist on maxing out everything they do, cooking fancy meals and doing elaborate activities that they truly hate for the sake of the kids, but this seems rare.

Kids can be annoying, but they can also be a lot of fun. Having the luxury of being able to spend months on end with them, without worrying about money, is a luxury that unfortunately is on the decline. But it is still more attainable that most realize.


> When I hear women whine about domestic labor I have to mention that single men and women do practically the same labor, for themselves alone, and washing clothes or cooking is much easier to do for multiple people than for one person.

That last part is very much not true, perhaps especially when children are involved.

> Women who stay home for kids invariably watch lots of TV and maybe do three hours of actual recognizable work per day max.

Maybe if you are very bad at recognizing work.

> without worrying about money

Not earning money in outside labor is not the same as not worrying about, and managing, money.


“Women who stay home for kids invariably watch lots of TV and maybe do three hours of actual recognizable work per day max”

As a parent, I believe I speak for many when I say [citation needed].


I don't have a citation but I have eyes and I see how real parents in my life have gotten by. Besides, even if it is somehow more work than 3 hours per day, it is probably close to that amount and far more enjoyable than most jobs. If you count sitting around watching your own kids play as "work" that demands "compensation", I feel bad for you.


Wait, do you have kids yourself? Childcare days with my 2yo are much more draining than most work days. It's never a case of just sitting and watching.


The other way to interpret GP is that we could implement long-term government-funded parental leave, especially if (!) the cost was comparable to universal child care. This could go to either parent, not necessarily the mother.


I mean, that is an advantage to people who push for that. That way the woman is made completely dependent on man and cant leave no matter how bad the situation gets. If you want men to be head of households then lack of female employment is an advantage.

Of course men to get simultaneously resentful over having to work while women done and spend their money each time they buy something, are not super thankful all of the time cause people are not, but that is not concern to those people either.


[flagged]


> The burden of proof is on feminists to prove why things they believe and optimize for are necessary and good, not the other way around.

Simple question, but what evidence would change your mind?


> We need fathers to protect and provide.

Protect from what? Themselves and other men? Why do they have to provide while women are being made helpless and dependent?

> Things worked this way for thousands upon thousands of years and led to our species being amazingly resilient

It led to high domestic violence against women. Even normalized one where being the wife was considered just being a man. These are very much correlated with lack of opportunities for women to get earn and live independently. Too many men were using the "protection" as an excuse for being the primary danger in their women's lives.


What the fuck, dude?

Bud, "your" people are "getting replaced" because they’re not fucking enough. Pounding your chest about "low-IQ" immigrants and masculinity won't help: they still won't fuck until they feel they can afford the lifestyle they want, regardless of who you feel the "burden of proof" is on. Enjoy seeing -- gasp!! -- a whole lot more brown faces with scary names in the future. (As always, the kids will be alright, regardless of whatever scornful glances they might catch from insecure adult "men".)

Want to raise the next generation of humans in a healthy, humanistic way? Then you go fucking do it, Mr. Big Man. Otherwise, let us do the sensible thing of having universal child care and go back to your racist rat hole.

Someday your woke kids will read your comment and will be mortified.


Reduce military spending by 20% and problem solved. Literally.

It's not that we don't have the resources, they're just poorly distributed because we're more interested in subsidizing our bloated defense industry than citizens and their children.


You'd think the Economist would care more about this study: https://childcarecanada.org/documents/child-care-news/11/06/...

Showing that subsidized day care pays for itself.


I think the case that they are making is exactly that -- because it is run on the cheap, is what leads to worse outcomes for children.


The Economist is a capitalism cheerleader, so no, they would not care for that study.


Yes, that's why I thought they'd cheer it. When the state provides day care, more Moms work and contribute to capitalism more than the cost of the day care.


Yes, but the state providing day care is "socialism", so ...


They economist is capitalist, not right wing. They have previously endorsed some socialist positions.


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