Survey by Nature finds that physicists disagree wildly about how to interpret quantum mechanics.
Ian Leslie's Notes on Growing Older, interesting and full of truth but not light reading.
Cambrian Chronicles searches for the lost Welsh kingdom of Pengwern, a deep dive through the fragmentary and mostly bad sources of Welsh history, 36-minute video. Also at wikipedia.
Tracking various uses of the word "diversity" in English-language books since 1960.
Ben Pentreath photographs summer in Orkney.
How to deal with a small alligator in your driveway (Twitter/X)
Freddie de Boer thinks our culture is now defined by a rejection of adulthood.
This week's past post is "Opening Fire," a 2017 meditation on the results of extreme rhetoric.
The Włocławek cup, a remarkable 10th-century AD artifact now in Poland.
Hannah Cairo produced an important mathematical result at 17. Since she was already doing graduate-level math, working with Berkeley professors through their concurrent enrollment program, she decided to skip college and apply directly to graduate school. Of the ten schools she applied to, only two admitted her. In two cases the math department wanted to admit her but this was overruled by someone higher in the administration.
Sabine Hossenfelder's ten favorite paradoxes and unanswered questions in physics, 10-minute video.
Home ownership among 30-year-olds is down, but home ownership within each marital category (married, never married, divorced) is up. The overall downward trend is driven by the decline in the marriage rate. (Twitter/X)
Noah Smith wonders whether the current boom in building data centers presages a collapse that might crash the economy.
Estonian theater puts on Romeo and Juliet using construction machinery.
Sacrificial pits at a neolithic village site in Germany.
The Aalborg Zoo in Denmark is asking pet owners to donate their elderly animal companions (guinea pigs, rabbits, chickens and even small horses) to feed to its predators. (NY Times, CNN) This was weirder and more intriguing before I discovered that they euthanize the pets first.
The parents convicted of felony child abuse aftter their son was killed crossing a busy road with his brother on his way to the grocery store. (NY Times)
Back in 2022, Sri Lanka had a financial crisis so severe the government tried to forcibly convert all farming in the country to organic, to save money on fertilizer and fuel imports. (Wikipedia has details on the crisis if your are curious.) But with IMF help and a $4 billion loan from India, the government has been able to stave off the crisis. Tax increases and spending cuts have brought the budget into surplus, and some people are feeling optimistic.
We have long known that left-wing violence increases the vote share of right-wing parties. Now a new study finds that in Germany, right-wing violence also increases the vote share of right-wing parties. But creating a crisis and then benefiting from the sense of crisis is an old political ploy, used at times by fascists, communists, and others.
Comparing Ötzi the Iceman's DNA to those of his Alpine neighbors. Or on YouTube.
Life in Pompeii after the eruption.
Debate rages on over "shaken baby syndrome," which some people deny and others defend vociferously.
"Algorithmic collusion": what happens when firms use AI agents to set online prices?
Study comparing democracy, institutional authoritarianism, and personal authoritarianism (dominated by one man or a small clique) finds that personal authoritarianism gets the worst economic results.
The paintings once used to guide the souls of executed men toward heaven.
Crazy Russian turtle tank (Twitter/X).
According to the people who spend their time staring at satellite photos of Russian tank storage facilities, not many tanks are left; at the attrition rate of 2024, all the storage facilities would be depleted early in 2026. So Russia has cut their attrition rate by using very few tanks this year. This means they are not running out of tanks, but, as a commenter on this post noted, not having tanks and not using them mean pretty much the same thing on the front line.
Ukrainian reserve officer Tatarigami doesn't see how either Ukraine or Russia can keep fighting for "nearly another decade," as some seem to expect: "Ukraine struggles with desertions and AWOLs. Russia, meanwhile, faces not only constantly declining troop quality but also growing resistance among its soldiers to continue fighting. This has led to an increasing reliance on punitive measures to enforce discipline." Says that the brutal methods Wagner used to handle prisoner soldiers have spread throughout the Russian military.
1 comment:
Home ownership among 30-year-olds is down, but home ownership within each marital category (married, never married, divorced) is up. The overall downward trend is driven by the decline in the marriage rate.
Pooled resources do make it much easier to acquire a house. But I think it's bizarre that you make no mention of housing prices at all.
The link you provide is comparing rates from 1990 to those of today. If we compare average house prices across the same span of time, we go from a house costing about $150,000 in 1990, to a house costing over $500,000 today.
Inflation, of course, must be considered, but it doesn't paint a pretty picture. That $150,000 in 1990 is the equivalent of $370,192 today. So why are average housing prices another $130,000 higher than that? That's a 35% cost increase, on an already massive expenditure.
There are also changes in patterns of where people want to live to consider. People in 1990 still wanted (or were at least much more willing) to live in suburbs and commute into cities for work, leisure, etc. In 2025, such an arrangement is considered deeply undesirable.
Part of that, of course, is that job offerings for young people are not as good as they used to be - it doesn't make sense to spend 2 hours commuting every day to work a job with mediocre pay, poor benefits, and little to no job security. That last point is a particularly big issue - stable, steady careers have declined in number. We now live in the age of "The Gig Economy", and young people rarely stay in a single job for more than a few years, often not by choice.
Young people are also entering the workforce with massive student debts, which was not the norm in 1990, further worsening their prospects. In addition, many degrees and diplomas have lost the value they once had 35 years ago, making taking on such debt to achieve them a terrible prospect.
There are so many other factors that MUST be considered beyond simple decline in marriage rates.
But even if you want to exclusively focus on marriage, the question to then ask is why is the marriage rate itself declining? To which I feel the answer is obvious - marriage is the product of young people having access to wealth and prosperity, and the accompanying stability and free time to invest into a social life and relationships.
When young people invest all their time and effort into working and making money, they marry less. See the examples of South Korea, Japan, China, etc. It's self evident that the more young people have to compete to "get ahead", the lower marriage rates will be.
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