I got a junk Precision workstation last year as a "polite" home server (it's quiet and doesn't look like industrial equipment, but still has some server-like qualities, particularly the use of ECC RAM). I liked it so much that it ended up becoming my main desktop.
My main desktop is temporarily a Dell server from around 2012 or so. Two were thrown out, each with two 2 GiB sticks of RAM, so I poached the other machine's RAM for a grand total of 8 GiB. I also threw in a small SSD for the / partition (/home is on the old HDD). The thing is dirt slow but I never notice, even YouTube video playback works fine. Even on hardware well over a decade old, Debian runs fine.
The math has a few problems then, because it seems rather difficult for me to have .1 child. Actually, it's impossible for me to have any children because I am a single man and it is not biologically possible.
> Hence, the "on average". For any 10 couples, they should have 21 children. If some have fewer, the rest have to have more.
This would seem to agree with "not everyone has to have children" - mathematically speaking you can quite simply put a couple zeros into the equation and still arrive at 2.1
> Sounds like a "you" problem.
I have no problem with the situation at all as I have never in my life had an interest in having children. I'm not sure I even see the changes in birthrate as a problem; people can adapt to demographic changes. But if it is a problem, then it must be some sort of systemic one and I doubt the answer is to try and apply pressure to individuals to have children by telling them to think of the economy or that it is some sort of societal obligation.
>This would seem to agree with "not everyone has to have children" -
No, but there are some fools who might conclude that just one person has to have millions of children.
>I have no problem with the situation at all as I have never
Oh, you have a problem. You just can't see it yet. While younger, your problem is that you will shoulder an ever-increasing burden as fewer younger people support many more of the elderly in generations past, until you yourself are then elderly and the few young people simply can't support you at all. A stagnating economy, defense insecurities to make the 20th century look tame, it all goes to shit.
>and I doubt the answer is to try and apply pressure to individuals to have children
Yet you're apparently happy to see people try to pressure the hundreds reading the comments here to not have children.
I remember perhaps a decade ago, a coworker and I were watching a clip of Zuckerberg walking up to a group of employees and they started clapping for him. I mentioned how odd it was to see, and he thought it was perfectly natural to applaud the CEO of your company. We never applauded when our boss showed up, and I've never really been sure where the line is for which authority I'm supposed to cheer for merely from being in their presence. I haven't thought about it too much since then, but obviously it's stuck with me.
As a society, we've all had our lips pretty firmly pressed onto the asses of the oligarchs for quite awhile, so it seems pretty natural that they think it's the natural order of things.
I don't think civilization ends if temperatures rise dramatically. A lot of existing agricultural land gets destroyed, but some currently unusable/unproductive areas that are too cold become viable. So the regions will shift. Painful but not insurmountable if it happens over a 50 year time span. But even if there wasn't such a compensatory mechanism, modern problem solving abilities will find a way - yes really. Look at the problems already solved. Nuclear reactors, solar power, vertical farming, genetically enhanced crops, alternative food sources will be engineered if the need arises. We can really stop saying that we know for sure society will end. I don't know how poor people will be affected, and yes there woll be winnners and losers as always during massive disruptive change - but hardly the end of human civilization.
I don't see where the GP changed their mind. They may not be ok with this particular action while still preferring the current administration to any alternative.
I've got a (probably former at this point) buddy who makes less than $15K/year. He seems to have lots of time to listen to right wing propaganda podcasts and likes telling "jokes" about how minorities are problematic. He was never really interested in politics when we were growing up and I suspect never voted before 2024. Poor people have interests and opinions too.
How much cheaper is a boring 3-year old Toyota versus a boring brand new Toyota? Why would the person who buys a boring new Toyota unload it for a significant loss after just 3 years of ownership?
Keynes said something that has always stuck with me.
> Anything we can actually do we can afford
I find it increasingly paradoxical that supposedly, our collective economic capability routinely increases (implied by ever growing GDP), while our budget situation looks ever grimmer.
This is such a profound quote, but most people need more context to understand it. I certainly did when I ran across it a few years ago. I believe our society would be much better if more people did.
It is a good quote, but the article you link actually undermines it slightly. Keynes' words are relying on a non-expert in construction being confident that construction is easy despite the fact that the systems we use to measure cost-benefit indicating that it cannot or should not be done.
No evidence is mentioned that there was enough available in the way of bricks, mortar, steel, cement or labour. The banker quite likely hadn't checked any statistics or made any estimates. There is no particular reason to consider his opinion even informed on the topic. Britain had just had suffered around a half-million war casualties drawn disproportionately from their able-bodied labourers and their factories for things like steel and cement had probably suffered a few hard blows and were likely being run ragged.
They could have forcefully reallocated resources away from something people thought was more important towards building houses; but the issue that is being glossed over is if someone thought that there were higher priorities than building houses ... what if they were right? The thing about economics is prices aren't arbitrary, they encode a combination of how easy a good is to produce and how much demand there is for a good. They can't just be overridden expecting a good result without factoring in those things.
If Britain had some magic ability to just build whatever they want and there were enough resources available to do whatever then the empire wouldn't have collapsed shortly afterwards. They were way over-extended in terms of what resources they needed vs what they had available.
You're reinforcing the quote. You're questioning the conditional part of the quote, the "if we can do it" part. If they actually couldn't do it, then they couldn't afford it. And that's what Keynes said.
Your second criticism performs the standard hijack. The natural follow on is "if we can do it, and we can afford it, should we do it"? Should we do it is the right question to ask. Just because we can and we can afford it, doesn't mean we should do it. But far too many people try to squelch the debate by asserting that we can't afford it. We can afford universal health care or a modest UBI or a green new deal or whatever expensive thing that the left wants. Whether we should is the question, not whether we can.
There isn't any evidence that they could do what Keynes was suggesting they could. I thought he was making the comment after the war, but I just looked at the date again and realised they were in the middle of WWII at the time! They most certainly did not have spare resources and couldn't possibly afford to be building houses with them. The example he's giving is a case where they couldn't afford it because they couldn't do it. If he'd picked an example where they could do it but people were claiming they couldn't afford it that'd be different and better. But if they could do something we'd probably also find that the financial figures suggesting they could in fact afford it.
"You can afford what you can do" is a truism - if you can do something, the financial system will tell you that you can afford it except if something really weird is going on. If the resources were there to build the houses then the prices would shuffle around until it was also affordable.
> Keynes > Anything we can actually do we can afford
Yes, but Keynes also pointed out the result of that: "In the long term we are all dead" :)
Seriously, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and as much as the economics mainstream likes this to be true nobody ever presented convincing evidence in support of it.
Just in the last 3 days, there were several posts on HN that pointed out the inadequacy of the GDP as a measure of economic development, and they presented serious evidence.
I feel that in a sense, "we" (the collective society) can do a lot because of the productivity growth from technology "afford" (enable) us.
In another sense, what "we" (part of that society -- an individual, a group, a government) can do is limited by what we can "afford" (pay). We cannot command the bricks and mortar and steel and cement and labor and architects to build houses and infrastructure without some form of compensation -- money for the architects and builders and cement/steel/mortar/brick makers and movers to exchange for food, drink, and shelter.
And in this grim budget situation, "we" (the government) are running out of ways to ask for productivity (goods and services for healthcare, education, welfare, defense) because we are out of ways to compensate the providers.
What can a government do then?
- force them to offer productivity without equal compensation (communism, colonialism, slavery, forced labor, cheap labor, unequal trade agreements, etc.)
- promise to repay them later (government bonds)
- give them something that they think is valuable but is less so and decreasingly so (money printing)
- encourage giving without compensation (charitable work and donation)
- repay them with compensation collected from those who benefited the most from the economic productivity growth (taxing)
I think the quote "We can afford what we can actually do" encourages the audience to think more about what we (as a society) can do and less about how we (the individual) are compensated.
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