At Crooked Timber, a discussion of culture wars and what they have to do with elite education and notions of "truth."
Surveys of how many children Chinese students want to have in the future suggest that the birth rate will keep falling from its current already low level. (Right now TNF is about 1.) According to official statistics, metropolitan Shanghai just recorded the lowest fertility of any major metropolitan area ever, around 0.61.
More Crooked Timber, an argument that 1) naval power is vastly overrated, and 2) China can't conquer Taiwan and isn't really trying. Relies on this survey of experts in Taiwan and the US; the respondents thought a blockade of Taiwan was much more likely than an invasion. I want this to be true but history says we should take seriously the statements of dictators concerning the places they want to invade.
Kevin Drum explains that the current police response to students occupying university buildings is not unusual, but has been pretty much the norm in 21st-century America. As my readers know, my general feeling is that intrusive, annoying protestesters almost always hurt their cause.
Something new to worry about: AI generated books about wild mushrooms, full of made-up information, are for sale online.
Archaeologists find evidence of the blessing ceremony for a Maya ballcourt.
The gang that has been stealing rare books from European libraries.
A new Italian project to digitize Michelangelo's drawings. Discussion at The History Blog.
Philippine Supreme Court bans golden rice, says the government did not consider safety issues when granting their approval. Golden rice has been genetically modified to produce beta carotene, the lack of which blinds about 500,000 children a year worldwide, including thousands in the Philippines. This in response to a lawsuit from Greenpeace, which has gone fanatical on GMO foods. Golden rice was developed by a non-profit and is free for everyone to breed and so on, so it doesn't come with the issues of corporate ownership that I think are serious for some other varieties.
Zooming into the Horsehead Nebula using Webb imagery, 90-second video.
Brutalist churches. Sets for your dystopian film. Or your nightmares. In a different vein, photographs of Europe's most famous libraries, from all periods.
Hungary's new, very generous pro-family policies – including a lifetime exemption from income taxes for women who have four children – have not budged the birth rate, which is declining in parallel to the birth rate in the Czech Republic. People say they aren't having children because it's too expensive, but when governments do all they can to make it affordable that has very little effect. Money is not the issue and therefore not the solution.
Theories about Roman dodecahedrons: Washington Post, Portable Antiquities Scheme, Reddit. One clue is that they are rather fragile and show no wear, which pretty much rules out anything but careful, occasional use. I think that use was ritual and people searching for practical uses are just silly. They probably think the same about me.
Kevin Drum summarizes a Washington Post study about a middle school that got positive results from using Yondr pouches to ban cell phone use during the school day.
Tyler Cowen interviews jazz musician Coleman Hughes, interesting about music, culture, and race.
How well do you actually remember works of art you love?
A random past post from 2015, review of a book on the Highland Clearances.
The Oryx count of Russian equipment lost in Ukraine has reached 15,000 systems: 2,948 tanks, 4,184 other armored vehicles, 725 self-propelled artillery, 369 multiple launch rocket systems, 68 radars, 80 electronic warfare systems, 109 jet aircraft, 137 helicopters, 3240 trucks and jeeps, 23 naval vessels, and 1 submarine. Those are mimimum figures. Meanwhile at least 4041 Russian officers are confirmed dead, and estimates for overall Russian war dead start at around 50,000 and go much higher, so probably at least as many as the US lost in Vietnam (58,000). Despite all of this, Putin is determined to push on to "victory."
5 comments:
Surveys of how many children Chinese students want to have in the future suggest that the birth rate will keep falling from its current already low level. (Right now TNF is about 1.) According to official statistics, metropolitan Shanghai just recorded the lowest fertility of any major metropolitan area ever, around 0.61.
I'm not remotely surprised - Shanghai specifically has truly insane housing prices, and the rest of China is facing a housing crisis in most non-rural areas.
Brutalist churches. Sets for your dystopian film. Or your nightmares.
I quite like most of them. Some of these are reminiscent of ancient rock-hewn churches.
I also note, the preponderance of churches shown are from post-war Germany, Austria, and Italy - cash strapped nations trying to rebuild their cities and economies in the decades after the worst war ever fought by humanity. Brutalism allows for the construction of large-scale civic buildings on a budget, which is a massive part of why it was employed here.
What alternative would you have preferred? That they spend money they didn't have on the more ornate styles you personally prefer? Or maybe they just refrain from building churches entirely, unless they can conform to your aesthetic demands?
Honestly, you complain about Brutalism as if the people who created it were not only somehow acting wickedly and perversely, but even doing so intentionally. You don't like the style of someone else's church? That's fine! But it's strange that you go out of your way to complain about something which doesn't affect you, and decry it as if it was an affront to human decency.
You normally don't post about things you dislike. There must be thousands of aesthetic choices you find ugly in other forms and fields, yet you don't bother to routinely post about them and your distaste for them. But for some reason, when it comes to raw concrete building construction, you get so offended you HAVE to lambast it every turn? Why?
Hungary's new, very generous pro-family policies – including a lifetime exemption from income taxes for women who have four children – have not budged the birth rate, which is declining in parallel to the birth rate in the Czech Republic. People say they aren't having children because it's too expensive, but when governments do all they can to make it affordable that has very little effect. Money is not the issue and therefore not the solution.
If you think the savings of not paying income tax for the rest of your life come anywhere close to offsetting the immediate tangible costs of having one child, let alone four, you're unhinged.
This is like if the government offered a $500 rebate to people who purchased their fourth new-model car, and then you said "Well clearly cost isn't the issue, and people aren't buying new cars for other reasons!" We're talking about a drop in the bucket here, pal.
Expanding upon my above comment with some actual numbers:
It's a bit hard to get information for Hungary via the English internet, but we can make a rough comparison to life here in America.
The average cost of raising a child from birth to adulthood is about $250,000. (And that's before a single cent goes to college, at which point the numbers explode.)
The average income tax rate is just around 15%. This is convenient, because that effectively matches the tax rate in Hungary.
The average amount of your lifetime spent working (and thus paying income tax) is about 42 years (ages 22 - 64); but the average woman only has her first pregnancy at 27, moving the number of tax-free years down to only 37.
Less if you take literally any time off for unpaid maternity leave. And even less if you put your career on hold to be a stay-at-home mother while your children are particularly young. Let's be generous, though, and round that to a nice even "35".
$250,000 / 35 years = $6756
If $7142 = 15%, then 85% = $47,619. That'd be the amount you would need to earn annually to merely break even from not having to pay income tax.
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Except that would be if you only needed to have a single child. You need to have FOUR.
So first off, quadruple the child-raising cost, from $250,000 to $1,000,000.
Next, readjust the number of years you actually receive tax breaks - even being generous, the number of working years which benefit probably will be no more than 30.
$1,000,000 / 30 = $33,333
If $33,333 = 15%, then 85% = $222,222. That's the minimum annual earnings to break even - meaning you'd have to be in the top 10%. Just to break even.
Of course, at that point, you still haven't paid a cent toward college, and you've got four college tuitions to think about. Also, the $1,000,000 price tag was the average price, and you're far above the average, so the numbers actually work out worse.
Also, even if you're one of the 10% (literally a member of the rich), you're still ONLY breaking even.
Worse than that, you're only breaking even DECADES LATER - all the costs of having children are front-loaded, but your return on investment only comes when you retire.
All in all, it's a TERRIBLE DEAL, that not even the rich would bother to take.
Typo above:
"$250,000 / 35 years = $6756"
That result shown is for the math for 37 years; I adjusted my calculations midway through to 35, and updated the line that followed, but forgot to adjust "$6756" to "$7142".
As my readers know, my general feeling is that intrusive, annoying protesters almost always hurt their cause.
I'd argue the kind of protest matters deeply, and that in most cases, protests HAVE to be intrusive and inconvenient to some extent if they want to have teeth to them.
Workers who demand fair pay and better working conditions can't just write letters, or assemble in a crowd somewhere out of the way where they can easily be avoided. They need to strike, and they need to picket and prevent scabbing - if they don't cause financial hardship to the company through the lack of their labor, they don't motivate the company to come to the bargaining table.
Citizens who protest unjust laws or policies often have to resort to civil disobedience, which is absolutely "intrusive" and "annoying" to many - certainly to the authorities, who have to devote a lot of resources to attempting to enforce the unjust laws being broken en masse.
Civil Rights sit-ins at restaurants were deeply "intrusive" and "annoying" to the bigots who wanted to refuse them service, and the police who were called in to remove them. Feminist protests like 1975's 'Kvennafrí' protest in Iceland were similarly "intrusive" and "annoying" - with 90%+ of all women refusing to work or perform domestic labor, society was completely paralyzed. And yet these tactics worked, when "non-intrusive" tactics would have failed.
The entire POINT of a protest is to motivate people to change their minds, and it turns out you often change a lot more minds when your actions make it hard or impossible for people to ignore you. Whether that's banging pots and pans outside of politicians' homes to prevent them from getting any sleep at night, or whether that's blockading streets and holding up traffic, or whether that's forcing the police to work night and day trying to arrest more people than they can reasonably process, you have to do SOMETHING to make yourself a nuisance, otherwise people CAN and WILL just ignore you.
Most college campus protests fail more from lack of people and lack of organization than anything else. If you have enough people being "intrusive" and "annoying", to the point that you can't be easily dispersed by the authorities, then people have to stop and actually listen to what you have to say. (At which point it helps to have clear, coherent, and actionable demands.)
A couple dozen students being disruptive on campus is doomed to failure because the protest can simply be shut down due to the low numbers. But 90% of the student body being disruptive is fairly likely to achieve SOMETHING, because neither the college nor the local police can realistically deal with that many people unilaterally, and will need to find some way to convince most of them to stop what they are doing, end the protest, let daily life return to normal.
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