I have not once had a friend ask me these sorts of questions. You need to make different friends.

Gift and a curse. Gift when some random person has a hilarious, crazy story. Curse because now it is infected with average people who are extremely materialistic, closed minded, and enchained by limiting self beliefs. So it quickly becomes a cesspool of hate, depression, and crab bucketing.

Rachel, who is in her 30s and lives in London, met her partner on the popular dating app Hinge, and was struck by his generosity. He insisted on buying her gifts and giving her cash to spend. She thought her now ex-partner was a “normal, decent guy”.

Yeah…

Yeah, on paper I’m a mgtow. After about 2 seconds I was like “wait, these people are losers.” Turns out I’m a relationship anarchist.

I stand corrected

I mean, it’s literally true. If they marry a citizen, they are legally entitled to stay.

No, because women can get their sexual needs more or less without trouble. A male sex robot owned by a woman would make me feel the same way though, similar to the man’s-arm-shaped pillows. It is sad, because they can’t get a their emotional needs for intimacy fulfilled and are resorting to hollow physical proxies

No. But you are an extreme minority, and your existence won’t change overall cultural views of sex robots.

Please tell me where this has been tried. I know of no major government entity which has enacted Georgist tax policy.

If you hate capitalism, you are missing the big picture - the enemy of the average person isn’t the accumulation of money and respurces, but the accumulation of power - money and resources being but one aspect of this. Capitalism is good because it mostly occupies the psychopaths with becoming rich, rather than seeking seats of power in government. Capitalism is the best form of innovation and resource distribution we have yet devised, and works well for people with proper safeguards in place preventing accumulation of too much wealth and ensuring the welfare of the average citizen.

Then for people who are struggling & can’t afford to produce one “high value” child they make a logical choice to do it later when they have more resources. Since humans are complicated they can create other values they see are more valuable then children or decide to do something later until having children is no longer a possibility.

In your language, we would expect people in the first sentence to revert to K type parents. If they do not, they simply fall into the category described by your second sentence.

And in rich countries, who are the people still having many children? The poor, uneducated, rural, religious/conservative segments of the population, who believe in some way or another that raising a child struggling in poverty is preferable to not having children at all.

Sounds like a pretty big cope. Sex isn’t about cumming. It’s about emotional connection with another human being. Being unable to get fulfillment of this basic human need is sad and lonely. This is why fleshlights have a stigma that beating your bishop the old fashioned way doesn’t - every healthy teenaged boy spanks it on the reg. But actually purchasing a device speaks to a level of hopelessness at obtaining actual sex that is sad, which implies a failure to be attractive, which is itself unattractive.

If that were true, we would expect richer countries to have higher birth rates. Instead, we see roughly the opposite trend. The richer a country gets, typically, the lower the birth rate. You can’t tell me that a teacher and a data entry clerk in Virginia are less economically capable of raising children than subsistence farmers in Malawi, no matter how high the rent in Virginia is.

If you want to see high income places with high birth rates, then you end up in very traditional/religious cultures, like Mormons and the Arab petro-states, where women face extremely high cultural pressure (if not force/violence) to be child-bearers.

Some books I enjoyed when I was a kid that didn’t fit the trips above:

• The Contender
• The Tripod Series
• Call It Courage

I’d really like to see the evidence for this statement, since it really seems like this trend is just an extension of the phenomenon we see in poorer countries: when you give women education, opportunities, and birth control, fewer of them will have children. It stands to reason that the more education, the more opportunities available, and the more freely accessible birth control is, the fewer women will have children.

Me, but I have no dogs and don’t play video games.

Removed by mod

The issue is that you presume the options are either public housing or a tent. You are missing the other option, which is simply allowing developers to build more housing on their own and removing the ability to speculate on land value, forcing land owners to earn an income only by the benefit their land provides to others. Zoning reform, good urban infrastructure, and Georgist tax policy do this without necessitating terrible concrete commie blocks everywhere

Thank God someone in this thread actually knows how HOAs work.

I’ve learned that i’m a LOT less sexual than a lot of my peers so I just don’t get it.

This is probably the differentiating factor. I am a highly sexual person.