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Small Businesses Are Lowering South Korean Fertility | Chasing Sheep
Full of fascinating insights:
The stakes, it may be said, are high. Yet the response has been quite tepid. True, South Korea has spent over $270 billion on subsidies to boost fertility since 2006, but since the same date, the nation’s fertility rate has continued its descent to new lows. Worse still, the speed of the collapse has hastened in the past decade: since 2015, fertility has declined every year, after some initial change of course in the late aughts. For a country that has seemingly mastered the collective action problem, this is a poor showing. […]
The most radical proposal may still be in the works: a whopping $73,000 cash subsidy for new parents. While the figure is impressive, it is only the latest instantiation of what has long been apparent: South Korea’s government would like to solve its birth rate woes through precision nudges that uphold the status quo. Surely that is the dream of President Yoon, a childless Seoul National University graduate who has been served well by the Confucian Olympics. Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, a Harvard PhD equally bereft of progeny, likely feels much the same.
But as South Korea’s government inevitably finds it cannot pay its way out of its demographic collapse, it must turn its attention to the structural causes of its particularly low fertility rate. Among them is the most warped labor market in the developed world. […]
South Korea’s relationship with chaebols, then, may be said to be a love-hate one—no different than the American who can’t resist the Walton family’s Great Value or Bezos’ two-day logistical feat. But the biggest problem with chaebols, it turns out, is not collusion or anticompetitive practices—it’s that there aren’t enough of them.
You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to buy sperm | The Guardian
It’s easier than ever for single women to have children on their own ... or so I thought. Then began my $17,000 journey […]
I got my period. The clock was ticking – I had about 14 days until I’d ovulate.
I went back to Fairfax Cryobank. Four donors met my search criteria. One, with a big toothy grin in his childhood photo, caught my eye. I listened to his audio clip, and as he described building a cabin on his friend’s land, I knew this was the donor for me. The screen said “add to cart”, which meant there were more than 25 vials available.
I contacted GeneScreen for a new appointment. They could see me on Monday; I’d be ovulating on Wednesday. Even an overnight sperm shipment might not get to the clinic in time – and this was assuming Kindbody could even schedule me on such short notice. I thought of the Target at-home insemination kit. Maybe I could just have the sperm shipped to my apartment?
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Happy fun Cold War 2 update | Noahpinion
He predicts that China will move on Taiwan with a blockade rather than an invasion, attempting to bring the island to its knees by simply asserting that it’s a Chinese province and daring any outside powers to treat it otherwise. An invasion would be extremely difficult and risky, and would definitely generate huge losses for the world economy, with China itself being hard-hit. A blockade, in contrast, would dare Taiwan and its protectors to make escalatory moves, while at least offering the possibility of a cheap, bloodless conquest.
In the past few weeks, a number of events have occurred that strongly support Zelikow’s core arguments and predictions. In response to the election of a new Taiwanese president, China has surrounded Taiwan with warships, obviously conducting a dry run for an actual blockade of the type Zelikow describes. And Russia is making a number of aggressive moves toward NATO countries, signaling that he won’t be satisfied with conquering Ukraine.
Let’s go through some of those scary developments.
The Sins of the Educated Class | New York Times
David Brooks:
Like a lot of people, I’ve looked on with a kind of dismay as elite university dynamics have spread across national life and politics, making America worse in all sorts of ways. Let me try to be more specific about these dynamics.
The first is false consciousness. To be progressive is to be against privilege. But today progressives dominate elite institutions like the exclusive universities, the big foundations and the top cultural institutions. American adults who identify as very progressive skew white, well educated and urban and hail from relatively advantaged backgrounds.
This is the contradiction of the educated class. Virtue is defined by being anti-elite. But today’s educated class constitutes the elite, or at least a big part of it. Many of the curiosities of our culture flow as highly educated people try to resolve the contradiction between their identity as an enemy of privilege, and the fact that, at least educationally and culturally, and often economically, they are privileged.
Imagine you’re a social justice-oriented student or a radical sociologist, but you attend or work at a university with a $50 billion endowment, immense social power and the ability to reject about 95 percent of the people who apply. For years or decades, you worked your tail off to get into the most exclusive aeries in American life, but now you’ve got to prove, to yourself and others, that you’re on the side of the oppressed.
Imagine you graduated from a prestigious liberal arts college with a degree in history and you get a job as a teacher at an elite Manhattan private school. You’re a sincere progressive down to your bones. Unfortunately, your job is to take the children of rich financiers and polish them up so they can get into Stanford. In other words, your literal job is to reinforce privilege.
This sort of cognitive dissonance often has a radicalizing effect. When your identity is based on siding with the marginalized, but you work at Horace Mann or Princeton, you have to work really hard to make yourself and others believe you are really progressive. You’re bound to drift further and further to the left to prove you are standing up to the man.
This, I think, explains the following phenomenon: Society pours hundreds of thousands of dollars into elite students, gives them the most prestigious launching pads fathomable, and they are often the ones talking most loudly about burning the system down.
‘Natty or not?’: how steroids got big | The Guardian
Once upon a time, it was only hardcore bodybuilders who pumped themselves up with testosterone. Today it is no longer niche. But how dangerous is it? […]
Over the past six months, I have spoken with more than 30 steroid users from different walks of life, as well as gym owners, former pro bodybuilders and powerlifters, fitness influencers and people familiar with the dealers who sell these drugs or cook them up in underground labs. What became clear through these conversations was that the values of previously marginal subcultures long associated with steroid use – such as bodybuilding or powerlifting – have increasingly entered the mainstream. They have flourished on social media, at the same time that larger cultural taboos around drugs and medical interventions have faded. The result is that more young men now feel drawn, or pushed, to transcend their natural limits in a way that would have seemed frightening or pathological to previous generations. As one 20-year-old in the West Country taking his first course of steroids told me, he was initially “terrified about the idea of sticking a needle with mostly unknown contents in”. Now, though, it’s as easy “as waking up and making a brew in the morning”.
The gentle parenting bust | Business Insider
Millennials wanted to be better parents. So why are their kids little monsters? […]
She employed me for nearly a year. And she was far from the only client who began to emphasize their children's preferences.
As an in-demand babysitter for the property-owning intelligentsia of Toronto, I witnessed this gentle-parenting takeover up close. Flimsy collapsible strollers were replaced with unwieldy stretch-cotton contraptions that strapped infants to parents' bodies and ensured tuned-in and responsive caregivers. Children old enough to unclasp a nursing bra were encouraged to put those fine motor skills to use until they decided they were ready to chew solid foods. Baby sign language progressed from a type-A-parent novelty to the standard operating procedure. Most striking of all, multiple clients barred me from issuing a firm "no" in the presence of their preschoolers, let alone to them — it was a soft "no, thank you," or bust. […]
When gentle parenting veers off course, it can be detrimental. Research recently published in The Journal of Pediatrics found that a decadeslong trend toward high parental involvement — and, specifically, the diminished childhood independence that can result from it — neatly tracked with rising rates of depression and anxiety in children and teens, which have reached a record high. Separate research links permissive parenting with "high levels of aggressiveness, antisocial behavior problems, and lack of self-discipline." These attributes are not only unpleasant to be around but also risk a child's ability to form meaningful relationships — a key predictor of lifelong physical and psychological well-being.
How much can you really learn about a country from visiting it? | Noahpinion
The main thesis is obvious, and yet there are several good points here:
In my experience, tourists also tend to make mistakes about countries’ economic situations from looking at the public buildings and infrastructure. Tokyo, for example, is a visual marvel, with forests of newly built buildings, immaculate shops and restaurants, and beautiful parks. But only once you live in Japan for a while do you realize that many Japanese people are quietly falling into poverty. And going to Shanghai or Shenzhen can trick you into thinking China is the richest country in the world, instead of a middle income country — China is just coming off of the greatest construction boom in world history, and everything in those Tier 1 cities is at the beginning of its capital depreciation cycle.
Of course, staying in a place for years doesn’t guarantee that you’ll understand it at a deep level — some people can live in a country for a decade and have startlingly little insight about it. But there are lots of pitfalls and barriers to understanding that are much worse if you only visit for a short time.
For example, if you don’t spend much time in a place, who you meet will be heavily dominated by selection effects — especially if you don’t speak the local language. If you go to China as an American tourist or to look for companies to invest in, your conversations will tend to be with Western-oriented Chinese people who speak some English. People who like foreign countries and speak foreign languages aren’t always representative of the societies they live in. If there are highly nationalistic Chinese people sitting around talking about how they want war with the U.S., they’re probably not going to be at your hot pot party.
Finally, in my experience, people tend to see foreign countries through the lens of their preconceived notions and pre-existing stereotypes. […]
It has never ceased to amaze me how much people from the U.S. and other Anglosphere countries tend to rely on stereotypes to understand Japan. […]
I should mention that many of these stereotypes are just plain flat-out wrong. The most egregious example is the notion of “guilt vs. shame cultures” — Benedict wrote that Westerners obey their internal consciences (“guilt”) while Japanese people are motivated instead by the threat of social sanction (“shame”). A fair number of Americans still believe this, but it’s complete and utter nonsense.
Country Music Violates the “Sacred Project” of Elites | National Association of Scholars
What’s my point? Call me a prude but I felt uncomfortable with the reality that an individual with such remarkably predatory tendencies was treated as a revered celebrity in the contexts of a family-friendly national TV broadcast. My discomfort was aggravated by cognitive dissonance as I considered the severity of Offset’s criminal conduct against the transgressions by Jason Aldean and Oliver Anthony. I am, of course, referring to the two country music singers whose songs animated a great deal of outrage last summer.
Anthony Fauci failed during the coronavirus response | Sensible Medicine
Perhaps a bit easier for me to include this as someone living in the UK, where response to Covid was much less a “my team” vs. “your team” argument…
Although he was director of the NIAID, and although he controlled a 5 billion dollar infectious disease research budget, he chose to launch, fund and conduct precisely ZERO randomized trials of non-pharmacologic interventions.
No trials of masking vs no masking, or n95 masking vs cloth masking. No trials of 3ft vs 6ft distancing. No trials of staggered school reopening or closure. No trials of cohorting. No trials of varying testing strategies. No trials of masking kids 2 to 5 (which only the US did). He went on TV and made confident assertions about what was best, time and again, and, though he could have tested any one of his assertions, he repeatedly failed to test them. […]
What does the Bendavid and Patel paper mean?
It means that Anthony Fauci and a handful of other leaders globally who set global pandemic policy did so in a way that we learned absolutely nothing and most likely (at least by sheer number of model results), did nothing to change COVID spread.
How the quest to type Chinese on a QWERTY keyboard created autocomplete | MIT Technology Review
Decades before its rediscovery in the Anglophone world, autocomplete was invented for putting Chinese characters into a computer. […]
With these four dozen keystrokes, Huang was well on his way, not only to winning the 2013 National Chinese Characters Typing Competition, but also to clocking one of the fastest typing speeds ever recorded, anywhere in the world.
ymiw2klt4pwyy1wdy6 … is not the same as 高举中国特色社会主义 … The keys that Huang actually depressed on his QWERTY keyboard—his “primary transcript,” as we could call it—were completely different from the symbols that ultimately appeared on his computer screen, namely the “secondary transcript” of Hu Jintao’s speech. This is true for every one of the world’s billion-plus Sinophone computer users. In Chinese computing, what you type is never what you get.
For readers accustomed to English-language word processing and computing, this should come as a surprise.
Mexico’s New President Is An Enigma | Persuasion
Yesterday, Mexico elected Claudia Sheinbaum president by an overwhelming 30 point margin. You’d think this gives her a crushing electoral mandate—it doesn’t. Having pitched herself as a stand-in for Mexico’s hugely popular but term-limited president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador—better known as AMLO—Claudia Sheinbaum is ascending to Mexico’s powerful presidency as a cipher, running on borrowed charisma at the head of a party she doesn’t control, committed to a troubling agenda of rolling back democratic institutions. In a country where democracy is new and nostalgia for single party-rule remains strong, the first democratically elected female president could double as that democracy’s undertaker.
Or she might not. It’s hard to tell. After two-and-a-half decades in public life, all the public really knows about Claudia Sheinbaum is her dogged determination not to allow any daylight at all between herself and her hyper-popular mentor. And so, how you feel about her is irreducibly a function of how you feel about him.
Bowel disease breakthrough as researchers make ‘holy grail’ discovery | The Guardian
Scientists pinpoint driver of IBD and other disorders with work under way to adapt existing drugs to treat patients
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Tokyo dating app to promote marriage, keep out phonies | The Asahi Shimbun
To promote marriage and address the chronically low birthrate, the Tokyo metropolitan government is releasing its own dating app with an emphasis on strictness to prevent problems associated with other match-making services. […]
In addition to a photo ID, users will have to provide an income certificate and show they are single through their family register or other official document.
Users will also be required to enter 15 items of personal information, including height, educational background and occupation, which will be disclosed to potential matches.
An interview with the app’s operators will be mandatory for registration.
On top of that, users will be required to sign a pledge stating that they are using the app to find a marriage partner, rather than seeking a casual relationship.
Birth of universe’s earliest galaxies observed for first time | University of Copenhagen
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, University of Copenhagen researchers have become the first to see the formation of three of the earliest galaxies in the universe, more than 13 billion years ago. The sensational discovery contributes important knowledge about the universe and is now published in the prestigious journal Science.
New 'Sugar World' Discovered in Kuiper Belt | Newsweek
Arrokoth, a distant object in the Kuiper Belt, contains significant amounts of organic molecules, including complex sugars, giving it the new nickname "Sugar World," a study has reported.
Updated Formula on Alien Intelligence Suggests We Really Are Alone in the Galaxy | Gizmodo
I’m not convinced the adjustment is justified (nor was the Drake Equation particularly precise to begin with), but what do I know:
An adjustment to the famous Drake Equation could radically refine estimates of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy.