Your arguments (explanations?) would seem way more relevant if they didn't go 100% counter to observation.
I don't know why you're trying to explain an outcome that is opposite of the observed outcome.
Are you saying that while more money is correlated with less fertility (the fact), that somehow even more money will reverse the trend and start going the other way?
Based on observed data, one could almost make the case that if only billionaires start stealing from the poor even more, then birth rates should go up.
It wasn't really supposed to be about money vs fertility rates. I was trying to provide some observed examples of why having more money might mean more expensive kids. Or how being poor means the cost and expectations are lower.
I've always believed that it isn't money itself, but access to healthcare and education that lower fertility rates. Money correlates really strongly with access to healthcare and education.
Having good education and healthcare leads to birth control and maybe an abortion if the BC fails.
When a family of three is making $15K a year, do you believe baby four, five and six were planned out in agonizing detail? Or do you think maybe they weren't planned at all?
And I do believe more money going around would help. If the perspective is "I can't afford it", those who are doing OK will not have children if they can help it.
> The fact is, most of the freedom I had before kids, I never used.
That just seems like close to the definition of freedom. I have the freedom to go outside right now and eat dirt. I've never used it.
If you didn't do something then I guess you didn't want to, more than the things you did choose to do instead.
The only way you'd have enough life to do "most" of the things you'd be free to do, is if you're not free to do but a tiny thing.
> See what I did there?
Yup. Made no sense at all, is what. A UAE passport makes you free to visit 181 countries either visa free or visa-on-arrival. It's still freedom even if you don't take the time to visit all 181 countries.
It's not even an interesting paradox. It's just an obvious part of freedom.
Most people don't visit more than 35 countries. An Afghanistan passport gives you access to 35 countries.
It's always awful. This site is exagerated in degree, but in kind it's merely on the scale of awful.
Computers should not waste my time. Even if eyes are 10ms faster than the awful fade, if a million people see it, that's almost three hours of human life down the drain.
And when scrolling fast, or far, it's not uncommon to have it waste a second of human time. A million of those is 38 human working days, just flushed down the toilet, because someone wanted "pleasant".
It's fantastically disrespectful of other people's time.
The web is already slow. No need to deliberately spend effort to make it even slower.
"It's fantastically disrespectful of other people's time."
And this is what people have become way, WAY too tolerant of. The deliberate theft of customers' time. While this is obviously a very minor example, there are lots and lots of others that aren't.
I’m a fast scroller and skimmer. Info scroll down and the text is not there I’ll just assume that the site is shot and close it. Ain’t nobody got 200ms to wait for a god damn fade in when there’s an infinite amount of sites out there to discover.
> million of those is 38 human working days, just flushed down the toilet, because someone wanted "pleasant".
This is the wrong conclusion. The amount of work that can be accomplished summing one second from 38 million people is approximately zero - much different from stealing 1 day from 38 people or 1 hour from 912.
It doesn't matter whether useful economic work can be accomplished with savings of one second per person. Directly inflicting frustration one second at a time is still a bad thing.
And obviously, those seconds can add up to meaningful time wasted even on an individual basis.
> The amount of work that can be accomplished summing one second from 38 million people is approximately zero
First of all, I said one million people, not 38 million people.
But second (no pun intended), this waste of human life doesn't just aggregate across people, but also for multiple offenders one any one particular victim.
A second on this website, a second on that site, a 10 second "loading" animation screen on a blog. It adds up. It adds up to all individual users actually wasting their life and productivity.
Your implication that it's fine to willfully waste a second from a million people is either not understanding what "a million people" means, or a borderline psychopathic disregard for other people.
You can also throw your trash on the ground, because really, is the city measurably worse off just because of you throwing just two candy wrappers in the park once a day? If someone accidentally drops trash, or makes a slow website because they don't have skill or time to make it faster, then that's a completely different matter.
I don't have a strong opinion either way on the effect, but I do have to say that I always find it amusing how fatalistic HN can sometimes be over the most minor cosmetic inconveniences, couching them as "wasting (large amounts of) humanity's time" and "disrespecting people" as if we're talking about something far more serious than little animations on a webpage.
I mean, you might not like it, and that's fair and understandable, but is it really that big of a deal? Surely not.
I mean, like the other commenter I would just close the page instead of enduring it.
But yes, in fact if this page succeeds then it's wasting human life on things as productive as spam phone calls. People have solved the latter by simply not answering for unknown numbers.
Not sure what you mean by "fatalistic". To the point where I'm not sure that's the word you mean. It's fatalistic as in fate. Maybe you mean morbid?
Standing in line at the DMV is also all "counting flowers on the wall, that don't bother me at all"? But even at the DMV it's (hopefully) not done maliciously.
> cosmetic inconveniences
Sometimes things suck. That's not remotely as frustrating as knowing that someone went out of their way to make your life worse.
> is it really that big of a deal? Surely not.
If we capped all laptop CPUs to 600MHz, would it really be that big of a deal? Maybe they did it because of the acoustic preference of not needing to spin the fans as much, and therefore you are not allowed faster CPUs?
They didn't go out of their way to make your life worse. They went out of their way to design something they thought you would like, but you didn't like it.
It's too late to edit my other comment, but it's shocking to me how the people downvoting that comment can have such a lack of empathy and respect for people working in daycare.
I can't understand how one can treat people like servants, forcing them into unpaid overtime, to wait until I'm good and ready to show up. And to be upset and call it "unacceptable" to compensate people when you mistreat them.
> For most practical purposes, Swedish electricity generation has been basically fossile free since the 1980's.
I think "practical purposes" should include the fact that thanks to also shutting down a bunch of nuclear, Sweden regularly imports German/Polish coal power.
Sweden claiming fossile free is only technically true. Practically there's a mountain of greenwashing.
So no, I would not say what you just said. I find that greenwashing dishonest.
By being anti nuclear, the green parties around the world have caused more radiation[1] and climate changing co2 than any other movement in history.
[1]
An oft cited statistic is that coal causes more deaths every single year from radiation (excluding accidents) than nuclear has has caused in its entire history INCLUDING accidents.
I mean, you can call it a "mountain" of greenwashing but to me it looks more like a mole hill. Total Swedish electricity production is typically 160 to 165 TWh per year and total consumption is usually between 135 and 145 TWh.
In 2025, the net export was about 33 TWh. Gross import from Germany, Poland and Lithuania, including transit to other countries, was 1 TWh. So, imported power from countries with coal power plants was less than 1% of total consumption, and the amount of fossil free power exported was more than 30 times greater than the amount of (potentially) fossil power imported. 1-2% fossil energy in the mix is to me not really significant, and especially not considering how much fossil free power is exported.
I think it's huge greenwashing to claim to not have coal power, but just import it when needed. What practical difference is that to having coal power domestically? That's just saying you recycle all plastic, only to send it to the third world to dump in rivers.
So I think it's untrue to say that Sweden doesn't rely on coal power. Without coal power it'd have regular blackouts. I rely on being able to take a breath every couple of seconds. If I only get an annual average of a breath every few seconds, I'll die.
One could show great generation and net export statistics with a sufficiently large batteryless solar installation, and still import coal power every night and cloudy day.
What is true, but can easily imply an incorrect conclusion, is that Sweden's very good in being self sufficient in clean power generation statistically. Yes, very much true. But it's largely due to geography, and not merely something to replicate. Sweden has way more viable places where hydro could be installed, than most countries (though where economical and otherwise acceptable, it already has). And it's sparsely populated; Sweden is bigger than the UK, but with one seventh the population. So if the implication is that "if we can do it, so can you" then that's false.
Luckily the political wind (including population opinion) has started to turn in favor of nuclear power, again. Maybe everything can be solar in 100 years, but we can't have 100 more years of coal.
> So I think it's untrue to say that Sweden doesn't rely on coal power. Without coal power it'd have regular blackouts.
The european grid is interconnected so it's basically all fungible. But it's not the case that there would be blackouts, since the price mechanism is used to match production, demand and return on production investments. So policy decisions to ramp down fossil generation result in investment decisions to new non fossil generation capacity.
> The european grid is interconnected so it's basically all fungible.
This is the point I'm making. It's not a counter point, it's exactly the point I'm making. Sweden "has" a bunch of coal plants, just located in Germany and Poland. This allows Sweden to skip planning for exactly what renewable is bad at.
Otherwise this is like saying "antibiotics are completely unnecessary because 99.99% of the time you don't need them, and when I do need them I just get them from a pharmacy". Right… so you do need and rely on them.
But Sweden also has a geographic electricity transportation problem. Electricity generation exists where (most) consumers are not. And this is also due to the MUCH more limited flexibility of renewables, especially hydro. Could easily be cheaper to get coal power in the south instead of hydro "shipped" from way up north. Hell, sometimes electricity in the north has a negative price.
Sweden is a good local example of why we also can't just power all of Europe from some solar panels in Sahara. Except instead it's hydro way up north.
Let's say you have a job interview. You're 5min late, so they either don't hire you, or the receptionist says the interviewer is now not available. Are you now due the salary, because you being this late 5min cost you a lot of money?
If you in a private contract reject the terms of paying $5 per minute late, well then the other party now knows you plan to be late a lot, so they'll be glad if you take your business elsewhere.
Keeping people from being able to go home after their workday, effectively forced overtime, is incredibly disrespectful. And even if "it's not your fault", you are the only one that could have prevented it. So incentives should be in place that you don't. $5 per minute sounds fair.
If you force me to stay late for a full hour you'd BETTER pay me triple digits. But in this case the $300 for an hour may have to be shared among several people.
Really? My experience is that of C, C++, Go, Python, and Rust, Go BY FAR breaks code most often. (except the Python 2->3 change)
Sure, most of that is not the compiler or standard library, but dependencies. But I'm not talking random opensource library (I can't blame the core for that), but things like protobuf breaking EVERY TIME. Or x/net, x/crypto, or whatever.
But also yes, from random dependencies. It seems that language-culturally, Go authors are fine with breaking changes. Whereas I don't see that with people making Rust crates. And multiple times I've dug out C++ projects that I have not touched in 25 years, and they just work.
The stdlib has been very very stable since the first release - I still use some code from Go 1.0 days which has not evolved much.
The x/ packages are more unstable yes, that's why they're outside stdlib, though I haven't personally noticed any breakage and have never been bitten by this. What breakage did you see?
I think protobuf is notorious for breaking (but more from user changes). I don't use it I'm afraid so have no opinion on that, though it has gone through some major revisions so perhaps that's what you mean?
I don't tend to use much third party code apart from the standard library and some x libraries (most libraries are internal to the org), I'm sure if you do have a lot of external dependencies you might have a different experience.
Well, for C++ the backwards compatability is even better. Unless you're using `gets()` or `auto_ptr`, old C++ code either just continue to compile perfectly, or was always broken.
Sure, the Go standard library is in some sense bigger, so it's nice of them to not break that. But short of a Python2->3 or Perl5->6 migration, isn't that just table stakes for a language?
The only good thing about Go is that its standard library has enough coverage to do a reasonable number of things. The only good thing. But any time you need to step outside of that, it starts a bit-rotting timer that ticks very quickly.
> though [protobuf] has gone through some major revisions so perhaps that's what you mean?
No, it seems it's broken way more often than that, requiring manual changes.
But any time you need to step outside of that, it starts a bit-rotting timer that ticks very quickly.
This is not my experience with my own or third party code. I can't remember any regressions I experienced caused by code changes to the large stdlib at all in the last decade, and perhaps one caused by changes to a third party library (sendgrid, who changed their API with breaking changes, not really a Go problem).
A 'bit-rotting timer' isn't very specific or convincing, do you have examples in mind?
> I can't remember any regressions I experienced caused by code changes to the large stdlib at all in the last decade
I agree. But I'm saying it's a very low bar, since that's true for every language. But repeating myself I do acknowledge that Go in some senses has a bigger standard library. It's still just table stakes to not break stdlib.
> A 'bit-rotting timer' isn't very specific or convincing, do you have examples in mind?
I don't want to dox myself by digging up examples. But it seems that maybe half the time dependabot or something encourages me to bump versions on a project that's otherwise "done", I have to spend time adjusting to non backwards compatible changes.
This is not my experience at all in other languages. And you would expect it to be MORE common in languages where third party code is needed for many things that Go stdlib has built in, not less.
I've made and maintained opensource code continuously since years started with "19", and aside from Java Applets, everything else just continues to work.
> sendgrid, who changed their API with breaking changes, not really a Go problem
To repeat: "It seems that language-culturally, Go authors are fine with breaking changes".
To repeat: "It seems that language-culturally, Go authors are fine with breaking changes". I just chose x as examples of near-stdlib, as opposed to appearing to complain about some library made by some random person with skill issues or who had a reasonable opinion that since almost nobody uses the library, it's OK to break compat. Protobuf is another. (not to mention the GCP libraries, that both break and move URLs, and/or get deprecated for a rewrite every Friday)
The standard library not breaking is table stakes for a language, so I find it hard to give credit to Go specifically for table stakes.
And it's not like Go standard library is not a bit messy. As any library would be in order to maintain compatibility. E.g. net.Dialer has Timeout (and Deadline), but it also has DialContext, introduced later.
If the Go standard library had managed to maintain table stakes compatibility without collecting cruft, that'd be more impressive. But as those are contradictory requirements in practice, we shouldn't expect that of any language.
I don't know why you're trying to explain an outcome that is opposite of the observed outcome.
Are you saying that while more money is correlated with less fertility (the fact), that somehow even more money will reverse the trend and start going the other way?
Based on observed data, one could almost make the case that if only billionaires start stealing from the poor even more, then birth rates should go up.
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