In an agricultural society children are an asset. In an industrial or service based economy children are a sacrifice. This has always been my view on why birthrates are declining.
I share your view. I believe it was during the industrial revolution where the family was redefined from an economic unit to a loving unit. Kind of strange how nowadays it feels like it has always been this way.
It reminds me of the fact that despite how permanent our life patterns feel, we're never more than two or three generations from completely changing our social norms and life patterns.
In most developed countries there is no easy way for man to "opt out" of responsibility for an existing pregnancy. The argument goes that women can have an abortion or give the child up for adoption if the pregnancy is unwanted, but men have no guaranteed say in what happens. One slip up and they are on the hook for child support, etc.
Basically, some people think men should have a right to abdicate responsibility for a pregnancy at least up to a certain point.
Depend if society provide any social support to single parents. Here in Sweden I think there is a strong argument to say that children here are not worse off if they happen to have a single parent that get support from the state compared to a child that have single parent with support from the state and child support from a second parent. The point of the Swedish social welfare model is that all children has the same possibility in life regardless of the wealth of the parents, which mostly seems to be true for the less wealthy half of the population.
I'm not sure that's a constructive way to look at it. Arguably both adoption and abortion are harmful to the child. Arguably reducing taxes on a particular group is harmful to society at large. Both are done frequently, so I think there's probably more nuance than you imply.
A better way is stop doing stupid things. Many of us need to sleep in because we play around on our phones/games for hours before bed. I get up between 5-6 am every morning and go workout. Then I have super productive time for a few hours without interruptions. Come 9-10 pm I go to bed and am sleep in minutes from a full day.
I realized that when I used to stay up later I wasn’t very productive, and just wasted a lot of time.
Actually no. I end up with more free time to do the things I want to do.
Many of us (maybe not you specifically) just do things without really thinking about them. Watching TV, playing video games, etc... we do out of boredom or habit. Not because we really want to do them. I think PG has written about cutting out the bullshit that doesn't matter [1]. Those are the things I talk about being stupid. Does looking at FB for an hour before bed matter? How about some phone game? Or binging a whole Netflix series in one night?
I get so much more done through the early parts of the day, I end up with more time to spend with my wife doing things we want to do.
Everyone is different, but I found it is down to allocating the time you are most productive effectively.
If you want to get work done and you work best in the morning with no distractions, get up early and go to sleep early.
If you work best at night, stay up late and maximise your time in those productive hours.
If you are comfortable with your day job and want to maximise life enjoyment it's pretty much the same thing, except you're picking the time best suited for what makes you happy. No surprise that active people like to get up and excercise early, lots of daylight and that fresh morning air is invigorating. It's also no surprise that people who like to game or veg out tend to do it at night when they are slowing down from the day.
It is a concious choice though, and I feel many just accidentally fall into a pattern and forget they usually have the agency to choose.
> Everyone is different, but I found it is down to allocating the time you are most productive effectively.
I agree, and I used to be one of those who stayed up later. I found though with myself and some others I personally know that making the move to an early wake up was still better.
It's silly, but when you get a mental discipline win as the first thing you do in the morning (getting up) it builds on itself. The next step is, "I'm up, so of course I'm going to the gym". From there, "I got up early to hit the gym, of course I'm skipping that donut". And so on. Like I said, it's silly in some way, but it also builds this discipline. For me personally, it completely got rid of my procrastination habit.
Avoiding rush hour and hiring help when practical has been absolutely key for me. I was in a bad loop of insufficient sleep --> poor functioning ---> need to work more to compensate ----> insufficient sleep for years before I started taking this stuff more seriously. Sometimes still fale to get enough, but these two relatively minor changes have been really beneficial.
#4 will kill your mental health over time - would not recommend. Take 15 minutes to close your laptop and sit somewhere else. The other suggestions are really good.
I'd say that really depends on what your work environment is like. I've worked places where I'd much rather eat at my desk, quietly reading a book or newspaper, than go into a loud, crowded breakroom/cafeteria where I was either ignored or expected to talk to people I couldn't be myself around.
We don’t disagree, my point is to treat lunch as a complete break (even if it’s just to read at your desk) rather than powering through every day to try and leave a few minutes earlier.
No matter what disease you are worried about, it seems like you need to follow the same advice in your day to day life: eat better, smoke less, drink less, exercise more, sleep appropriately.
Don’t exercise too much. You wanna take the car out to have the motor running every once in a while but if your driving 200km/h everyday the engine is going to wear out prematurely
Indeed, overtraining is bad for you in all aspects, it even hampers training progress - it’s really good for nothing. I heard that you can avoid overtraining by keeping an eye on heart rate variability - if that is low, you are either over-stressed or overstrained, and should tread lighter. Some fitness trackers can measure HRV.
One thing I've been concerned with lately is the tradeoff between systems that strengthen with training and systems that degrade with use.
Most of my favorite forms of exercise (climbing, hiking, running) are pretty hard on my joints, along with several other risks like shin splints and pulley injuries. I know there's some capacity to strengthen tendons and ligaments, but I can't find decent data on what tradeoffs I'm making at what levels of activity. Replacing everything I do with swimming and intermediate-rep weight training would almost certainly offer a better tradeoff, but I want to at least work out what price I'm paying.
Their are workouts that strengthen joints up to a point and significantly reduce injuries. The trade off is you need to specifically focus on them and their are a lot of at risk joints.
More important in many ways is knowing what pain is a sign to immediately stop, and take time off to recover from. Taking a week or two off now can prevent significant long term issues.
Oh man, I miss what so hard. Can't find anything comparable today. Those were the golden days, when I could find obscure albums that you couldn't even pay good money for.
The argument for public transportation is not dead wrong nor impeding progress. Expanding bus systems is something communities can do today in order to reduce their carbon footprint and their traffic levels.
The argument tarboreous put forward, as the parent, is presumably the one under discussion.
The problem is it presents a false dichotomy, or at least a choice which highlights merely a current state and not a move towards future improvements, and uses that blindless to make a case against EVs.
Thing is, even if a country is 100% coal and ICE right now (which is already not the case, China is not 100% coal), moving the fleet to EVs is still a good move. Putting aside an argument as to whether central power generation is 'cleaner' than distributed (ICE) generation, as long as a country also makes moves to renewables in it's centralized power generation, then the two things work in conjunction.
A lot of the current 'omg greenwashing' push-back is people confusing arguments for 'better' solutions with those for 'perfect' solutions. Which don't exist. Better is still worth doing, and paralysis until 'perfect' comes along is a big ol' waste of everyone's time.
Urban citizens have better access to low carbon transportation (Walking, Biking, Mass Transit).
Urban citizens are easier to reach in many last mile problems. Power lines can be shared by more users. Less network cable needs to be laid per user. Fewer miles of water pipes are required.
Apartments common in urban areas are more fuel efficient for heating/cooling than stand alone houses commonly seen in suburbs and rural areas.
I think BNW's mechanism of control is much more relevant than 1984's. In BNW the mechanism for control is the carrot, not the stick. In the west we are definitely using the carrot.
Indeed, which is how we got into this comment thread to begin with. Personally I'd gladly pay to hide ads in services I use frequently, but that also makes me more attractive to the advertisers. Fortunately most services that I use that have an ad-free option have also kept it ad-free, at least for now.
