Comment by tokioyoyo
6 months ago
I guess that makes sense. Someone else commented how “maybe HN demographics just happened to be people who just had kids, thus the echo-chamber”. Which, would explain a lot.
Re: Musk — no real opinions about him wrt other ventures, but surely no sane person can look at him as a decent father figure, no? It just sounds like a “populate Earth for populating reasons!” completely disregarding the well being of the kids part. Which, I find, fairly sad.
I think it's more about concern for society and Western civilization in particular. Low fertility will cause nations, and cultures, to contract and eventually collapse. 'Eventually' not being some excessively distant reference - South Korea may well become a failed state within our lifetimes if nothing radically changes, seouly due to fertility. And most other nations will be right behind them.
As for anybody's parenting - I have certainly raised my children in ways that would offend the sensibilities of this group or that. But it's what I think is right. So under this mindset, and a bit of the Golden Rule, I do not criticize other's parenting outside of obvious extremes.
It is interesting that people have such strong views about South Korea or Japan's declining birth rate, but have very little to say about rich countries in Europe. Why is this? I never once heard anyone saw that Italy will become a failed states in X years in the future due to population decline. Recently, I saw a chart from Financial Times (here: https://www.ft.com/content/1b139d1a-07ea-4612-9c2b-62c430119...) that showed birth rates in Italy, Germany, Finland, and Spain are ultra low (less than 1.5). More likely: These countries will import more and more temporary, and possibly, permanent labour, to help in their industries. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are already doing it extensively, but it doesn't get very much press coverage.