To be clear, women’s work before World War II was more than just the dishes. If you look at the guidebooks published for housewives back then, you’ll see that they were expected to have quite a few skills that most households now generally outsourc to external businesses:

• Feeding the family. This was more than just cooking. They were expected to process foods from a much less processed state (much more butchery of meats and cleaning and processing of vegetable products, dairy products, baked goods), and then preserve foods for out-of-season consumption (pickling, preserving in jams/jellies, home canning, drying, and in some cultures smoking). Much of this work is now done by the industrial food processing industry so that we can buy cans or jars or boxes of the stuff that’s already processed or partially processed. Even our fresh foods have been cleaned and sorted and trimmed to mainly just the edible parts.
• Making and maintaining textiles. We see bits of this surviving into knitting and crocheting as hobbies, but back before the rise of cheap apparel it was important to be able to clean and repair clothes that we’d now just take to our local dry cleaner.
• Maintaining the house itself. Home improvement is masculine coded today, but a lot of the stuff that qualifies as home maintenance was traditionally the work of a homemaker. Plus things like heating the house required active involvement of keeping fires burning and fuel on hand.
• Making household consumables. Homemakers were making their own soap, their own candles, and all sorts of little tools.

The economic shifts that come from women leaving the home for the paid workforce are all over, and some of them are pretty pronounced. But it’s important to remember that women worked hard before they ever got paid for it. Life was toil.

It’s not actually a clear inverse relationship on the individual level, even if the data shows a correlation at the national level.

There are a few things happening that complicate the analysis at the individual level, too:

• Wealth/income are correlated with age, and 40 year olds tend to have both higher incomes and lower fertility rates than 25 year olds.
• Wealth also correlates with race, for better or for worse, and there have always been persistent differences in birth rates by race.
• The sample sizes aren’t big enough to show whether the very rich (95th+ percentile) actually reverse the trend, to where being richer is correlated with higher birth rates, where the curve ticks back upward at very high incomes.
• The correlation is actually the other direction when looking at the individual incomes in certain countries (Netherlands, Sweden, Norway), and the effect is stronger when looking at men and their incomes.

Other country level data also suggest that there are big cultural factors in birth rates as well.

All in all, the relationship between income and fertility is complicated, with lots of other factors at play.

I think it’s more accurate to say “You will die for Epstein so that the oil class stays wealthy.”

There have been examples of postponements of elections for emergencies (most notably, the mayoral primaries in New York scheduled on September 11, 2001 had to be postponed for 14 days later), I’m not aware of any instance of an actual changing of swear-in dates being postponed.

Fuckery can still happen, but I’m more worried about threats and governmental terrorism that suppresses votes on the election day that moves forward as scheduled rather than actually moving the election schedule itself.

Still interesting to see how it is implemented in neighborhoods and buildings that are over 150 years old. I think the Smithsonian museums in our capital are actually the most interesting examples, because many are old buildings whose historical character were preserved, but where wheelchair ramps, railings, and elevators were tastefully and functionally installed many decades or more than a century after the building was originally constructed.

And perhaps the best thing about the ADA is the sidewalk requirements. It doesn’t much matter why a sidewalk developed a raised crack when the ADA requires that it be fixed.

I’m not even disabled, but I’ve pushed baby strollers in different cities (including outside the US) enough to realize how nice it is to be in a city where all the sidewalks and public buildings are ADA compliant.

You buy guns to feel safe.

I buy guns to feel dangerous.

We are not the same.

Lots of non-American banks don’t want to deal with the rules, so it’s easier for them to just say that they won’t open accounts for Americans.

It’s not discriminatory.

I mean it quite literally is discriminatory, but it’s legal and justified discrimination.

Yes, but the economies of scale of cargo transport generally mean that the percentage of the total cost attributable to fuel cost is usually pretty small.

Take bananas, for example. If they cost $0.70 per pound at the store, how much fuel could have been used getting a pound of bananas from the plantation to the port, shipped from that port to a port in the United States, then from that port to a distribution center, then to the store? So what would doubling the price of fuel do for the price of bananas?

With more expensive items, shipping (and therefore fuel) is an even lower percentage of the total input costs.

The price of goods will go up with the price of fuel, but not as much as a lot of people seem to assume.

I wonder how those specific buyers’ household incomes are. Part of the “k shaped recovery” from COVID is that some people genuinely are richer than ever.

If 10% of US households make more than $250k/year, and richer households are more likely to buy new cars (and buy them more frequently), it might very well be that the $1000/month payments are being paid by those who can easily afford them, while the $300/month payments are the ones actually causing financial strain on average households.

Every once in a while there are multiple parties structuring a deal where someone is left with a bad deal when it’s all said and done. As a consumer, you just have to make sure it’s not you.

But take, for example, the early days of Moviepass. You pay a cheap subscription to a service, and they buy you unlimited mobile tickets at the theater. Too good to be true in the long term, but in the short term it was a good way to spend some money that venture capitalists were giving away basically for free.

Businesses aren’t always smart. Sometimes they make financial mistakes and it’s your duty as a responsible consumer to punish those businesses for those mistakes.

In the case of dealer/manufacturer/financing incentives and the individual salesman commission, sometimes the kickback/fee scheme leaves someone else holding the bag. If you can negotiate a lower sticker price because it comes with some predatory terms on financing, but there’s no penalty for prepayment, it might make the most sense to take the low sticker price (made possible by the lender paying the dealer a kickback for the loans), finance at high rates, and then pay the whole thing off as soon as you can, so that you get the “discount” without having to pay high interest/fees, then you walk away with a good deal in exchange for just a little bit more hassle and paperwork. Sometimes the incentives swing the other way, too, where the lender is affiliated with the manufacturer and needs to juice sales volume by offering below-market rates on financing. As long as you can actually see how everything works and you can find the pain point, it may be possible to get a good deal and dump the bad deal on some faceless corporation for them to worry about.

Complex but direct. People consume resources. Find me the example of people who don’t and I’ll concede this point.

You don’t need to dip into the negatives to show that one group of 1000 people consumes less resources than a group of 10 person. If personal resource consumption varies by several orders or magnitude between individuals, where one private jet trip over the course of a day can represent more than the annual consumption of someone else, then it is very easy to show that the correlation between population size and aggregate net resource consumption is weak.

The emissions were just taking place in a way you chose not to measure.

No, running the same analysis by place of consumption doesn’t significantly change things, because the biggest drivers of greenhouse emissions are still local consumption: transportation (especially air travel), heating, and things like concrete manufacturing (where the concrete tends to cure on site).

Ocean-based shipping is so energy efficient on a joules per kg (or per cubic meter) per kilometer traveled that shipping a container 10,000 km from Shanghai to Los Angeles uses significantly less energy and emits lower carbon emissions than a 1,000 km route over land.

My point is simple: anyone who believes that climate change is solved by depopulation is dead wrong. We should still be working to reduce emissions in places that have stagnant or dropping populations, because everything we’ve seen in the last 50 years (which you describe as a selective period, but I select that period because it’s been the worst in world history for carbon emissions and climate change) is that countries significantly increase their resource consumption right around the same time they slow down their population growth.

You’re fundamentally misunderstanding my point as an argument for the status quo, that what we as humanity are doing enough. No, I’m arguing that actually making the right changes are going to be orthogonal to population growth. Decarbonization is important, and needs to be done, even if you Thanos snap half the world’s population, because there’s nothing stopping the remaining humans from being even more resource hungry.

Distrubution of resources, now, during our collapse and after with regards to anything remaining while important, are secondary to getting all of humanity’s ecological footprint down to sustainable levels. This necessarily means fewer people AND less consumption.

That doesn’t necessarily follow, and is inconsistent with past observations. At a micro level, take the example of greenhouse emissions from the United States, which peaked in 2007 and have come down since (despite population growth and economic growth). On a per capita basis, the United States peaked in 1973.

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-states

At the same time, we simply cannot afford for other nations to increase their emissions to US levels on a per capita or per GDP basis. None of that has anything to do with the birth rate, and comparing the birth rates of different countries doesn’t reliably predict whether their CO2 emissions equivalents change (either by amount or by percentage).

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

Simply put, the relationship between birth rate and effect on environment is so loosely related that pushing down birth rate is likely not going to push down pollution or environmental destruction. The solutions are actual engineering and economics, not family planning and demographic policies.

One can agree that humanity and its actions are an ecological disaster, but what makes you think a shrinking population won’t be even worse than a growing population?

On a country by country basis, the low birth rate countries (that is, the rich ones) consume a lot more natural resources than the high birth rate countries.

This is because the actual amount of resources consumed by any given individual can have several orders of magnitude more or less resource consumption than some other individual, so that you can’t expect per capita stats to hold up in a world where population dramatically shifts.

Does anyone else think 3% return isn’t that spectacular?

But that’s not the percentage return on investible assets. That’s the increase in his net worth in a year.

Think about the typical upper middle class retiree who might have a 401(k) worth $1 million and a paid off house worth $500,000. If they get a 10% return on their portfolio, their house price appreciates by 5%, and they get $10,000 in social security income while their spending rate is $100,000/year, their net worth would go up by $100k + $25k + $10k - $100k for a total of $35k, which is only 2.3% of their total net worth. Even though their investments did pretty well that year.

Bezos is getting more than 3% return. He’s just spending a lot of it. Like on a $55 million wedding.

How do they get calculated?

This page has answers:

The CPI consists of a family of indexes that measure price change experienced by urban consumers. Specifically, the CPI measures the average change in price over time of a market basket of consumer goods and services. The market basket includes everything from food items to automobiles to rent. The CPI market basket is developed from detailed expenditure information provided by families and individuals on what they actually bought. There is a time lag between the expenditure survey and its use in the CPI. For example, CPI data in 2023 was based on data collected from the Consumer Expenditure Surveys (CE) for 2021. That year, over 20,000 consumer units from around the country provided information each quarter on their spending habits in the interview survey. To collect information on frequently purchased items, such as food and personal care products, approximately another 12,000 consumer units kept diaries listing all items they bought during a 2-week period that year. This expenditure information from weekly diaries and quarterly interviews determines the relative importance, or weight, of the item categories in the CPI index structure.

The CPI represents all goods and services purchased for consumption by the reference population (U or W). BLS has classified all expenditure items into more than 200 categories, arranged into eight major groups (food and beverages, housing, apparel, transportation, medical care, recreation, education and communication, and other goods and services). Included within these major groups are various government-charged user fees, such as water and sewerage charges, auto registration fees, and vehicle tolls.

If you want to see the current makeup of the basket of goods whose prices are tracked, and their weights in the index, here is Table 1 of the most recent report. And if you want to follow the price of a specific category over time, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis keeps a really helpful interactive chart service for almost every public economic stat. Here is Table 1 of the CPI report.

It’s a lot of data collection on prices across a lot of transactions, and a lot of list prices, and a lot of locked in contract prices, to determine how much people are spending on different types of things, whether the quality of those things is changing over time, and what percentage of a typical household income gets spent on those types of things.

1 oz = 28.35 g

Maybe that 1/3 of a gram is shorting someone, but a single ounce is closer to 28g than to 30g.

Obviously depends on the specific item.

Here’s the national averages for:

Flour

Milk

Boneless chicken breast

Or an entire table of food items they’ve been tracking monthly prices on for years.

The Five Dollar Footlong was a promo created in 2003 when the normal price of a footlong was $6, by a single franchisee. By the time the promo went national, supported by the chain itself (and a national ad campaign), in 2008, that became a big enough deal to really move sales. And they watered it down at some point (by late 2010 when I was working next to a Subway and no other lunch options, I remember it only being a specific sandwich that rotated monthly, with all other footlongs regularly priced). And it was eventually discontinued in 2012.

It’s hard to pin this particular promo and call it totally representative of all pricing in the mid 2010s.

$5 in April 1980 dollars is the inflation adjusted equivalent of $20 in December 2025:

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=5.00&year1=198004&year2=202512