Japan’s low birth rate explained by reductions in employment security

by philg

Japanese women have a fertility rate of about 1.4 compared to 1.7 for potentially pregnant American people (some of whom identify as “men”). The Rise of Modern Japan is a lecture series in which Emory University professor Mark Ravina explains his theory that the fall in Japanese fertility is due to the declining number of highly secure jobs. Women in Japan practice sexual selection, in other words, and select against men whose next 20 years of paychecks are not guaranteed. Japan neither valorizes nor financially encourages “single moms” to the extent that we do here in the U.S., so it isn’t practical for 2-5 women to mate with 1 attractive (financially or physically) male.

Separately, the lecture series covers what happened when a lot of guys in their 50s were sent into early retirement in the 1990s following the bursting of the Japanese asset bubble. Their wives referred to these unexpected all-day home-dwellers as “Sodai Gomi” (oversized garbage, requiring a sticker to be hauled away by the city) and “nureochiba” (wet fallen leaves, sticking to one’s shoes and tough to shake off).

(Why don’t the irritated wives avail themselves of no-fault (“unilateral”) divorce and take the house, cash, etc.? “Under the Japanese laws, a spouse cannot divorce at his/her sole discretion. Basically a mutual agreement between spouses are needed to divorce in Japan.” (source))

The lecture series also talks about the long-term effects of “3/11” (the Fukushima nuclear plant failure) on the Japanese psyche. Although the series is new (the professor mentions COVID-19), it might be out of date. Inflation in the price of fossil fuels has finally generated (so to speak) some renewed enthusiasm for nuclear power among the Japanese public. Bloomberg says that only 10 out of 33 possible plants are currently online.

Another interesting observation is that Japanese competence works against political and economic reform. Everything in Japan works reasonably well and therefore it is difficult to motivate voters to demand political change. Japan thus muddles through with its massive conglomerates that are cronies of the ruling parties.

From a 2004 trip to Japan, my rental car (maybe not the best idea if you can’t read kanji) next to a hill that has been concretized and a traditional Japanese garden ornament that I would desperately love to have for our own backyard!

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New York Times story on the baby formula shortage

by philg

Timed to coincide with the national shortage of baby formula, “The Feminist Case for Breast Reduction” (NYT, May 10):

Over the next 25 years, my breasts drew attention that I would not otherwise have received. Like a sexual beacon, they signaled to men everywhere. I’d always known I was queer and began dating women as a teenager. While I found some refuge in these intimate relationships, I still lived in the world of men, and the size of my breasts meant that my body was theirs for the staring, commenting, grabbing and fetishizing.

Frye and I were the same height, but her breasts were larger than mine, which were a 36D.

How much weight is 36D? Approximately 1.5 lbs. per breast. (source)

Cosmetic surgery is off-limits to the true feminist, but the implication is that working as a prostitute is consistent with feminism:

I grew up in the 1980s and ’90s, thumbing through my mother’s issues of Ms. and occasionally attending NOW meetings with her. Despite never having read any feminist writing on cosmetic surgery, I knew that the consensus was, as Kathy Davis, the foremost contemporary feminist theorist on the subject, wrote in a 1991 article in the journal “Hypatia,” that cosmetic surgery was “regarded as an extreme form of medical misogyny, producing and reproducing the pernicious and pervasive cultural themes of deficient femininity.” The woman who yielded to the desire to commit such violence to her body was a “cultural dope,” afflicted by false consciousness, believing she made a personal choice while actually yielding to a system that controls and oppresses women.

Years later, I found plenty of loopholes in my inherited feminism that permitted me to do things I would have thought off limits at 13, but none were big enough to fit cosmetic surgery. Even by my early 20s, the only people I knew who’d done it were friends who worked in the sex industry, for whom it seemed a professional investment rather than a personal one. I would need a more powerful kind of permission that I didn’t yet feel the authority to give myself.

The author has some experience with body modification:

My conception of feminism also permitted me to cover myself in tattoos, pierce just about every flap of skin on my body and stretch inch-wide holes in my earlobes as well as have them sewn back up 10 years later (a permissible “deformity” to have corrected). To change my body through cosmetic surgery, however, would violate the often-conflicting ideologies behind these allowances.

The supposed dichotomy between “medical” and “aesthetic” surgeries is reflected perhaps most starkly in today’s medicalization of sexual transition, the manner in which transgender people seeking surgery must pathologize their experience in order to receive permission from medical gatekeepers. Listening to the experiences of my trans friends and reading the works of trans writers pushed me to think differently about my own dilemma.

The summer before I made the first appointment, my wife and I spent an afternoon in a private room at a bathhouse in Port Townsend, Wash., and that is where I told her about my decades-long struggle with my breasts and my interest in surgery. I had never spoken aloud about it to anyone.

In other words, the NYT gives us a story about two members of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community that begins in a bathhouse. The self-described “feminist” chooses a male plastic surgeon and the result is a happy ending:

I had always experienced my body, particularly my breasts, as something I needed to keep hidden or to manage. In the first weeks after my surgery, I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror because the sight of the incisions made me woozy. Instead, I asked my wife to look and tell me what she saw. I stood and opened my shirt. It felt like baring myself to the sun for the first time. How warm it was. How quickly I had stopped treating my body like a terrible secret. It was less the physical alteration that made it possible than the conversation we had in that steamy room and the decision that followed. Naming my experience returned my body to me more conclusively than a scalpel ever could.

How bad is the formula shortage right now? Amazon offers some infant formula that they promise to deliver… in June. Most products are shown as simply “unavailable” with no promises regarding restocking.

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Happy International Day of Families

by philg

(with somewhat unfortunate timing given the tragedy in Buffalo) … the United Nations says that today is International Day of Families. The site has some statistics:

Maternity leave, which was offered in 89% of countries in 1995, was available in 96% of countries by 2015.

What about birthing persons who don’t identify as “mothers”? Based on the photos, the UN’s site seems to be plagued by cisgender-normative and heteronormative concepts of “family”.

Only 57% of women, who are married, or in a domestic union, are able to make decisions about sexual relations and the use of contraceptives and reproductive health services.

How is the term “women” defined? What about “men” who are capable of giving birth? Isn’t their decision-making power relevant? Also, the implication is that it is bad when people (“women”) can’t decide what medicines to introduce into their bodies. Should women also be able to decide whether to get a COVID-19 vaccine?

Here in the Florida Free State, where vaccine coercion is banned by statute, living together as a family means that we solve problems together… problems that we wouldn’t have if we had been more proactive about using contraception.

Readers: What are you doing to celebrate this day?

From yesterday, home of a future sea turtle’s family is staked out on Juno Beach:

(Performing 84 abortions on human pregnant people would yield nearly $100,000 in revenue for Planned Parenthood or similar. But 84 sea turtle abortions earned Lewis Jackson of Brunswick, Georgia 21 months in prison (justice.gov).)

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Is the New York Times the primary promoter of white replacement theory?

by philg

“White Replacement Theory” is in the news as a potential motivation for the recent mass murder in Buffalo. After a decent interval to mourn the victims, perhaps it is worth asking “Who could be responsible for spreading this false narrative?”

“It Was a Terrifying Census for White Nationalists” (New York Times, August 2021):

The white power acolytes saw this train approaching from a distance — the browning of America, the shrinking of the white population and the explosion of the nonwhite — and they did everything they could to head it off.

They tried to clamp down on immigration, both unlawful and lawful. They waged a propaganda war against abortion, and they lobbied for “traditional family values” in the hopes of persuading more white women to have more babies. They orchestrated a system of mass incarceration that siphoned millions of young, marriage-age men, disproportionately Black and Hispanic, out of the free population.

On every level, in every way, these forces, whether wittingly or not, worked to prevent the nonwhite population from growing. And yet it did.

Meanwhile, the white population, in absolute numbers, declined for the first time in the history of the country.

“What the ‘Majority Minority’ Shift Really Means for America” (NYT, August 2021):

In 2015, the Census Bureau published a report projecting that by 2044, the United States’ white majority would become merely a white plurality: immigration and fertility trends would lead to America’s ethnic and racial minorities outnumbering its white population.

Because of the status white people retain in American society, a degree of privilege and belonging still awaits those who can claim it. People who identify as white hold disproportionate power and resources today, and this pernicious reality seems unlikely to change even if white people do become a 49 percent plurality in about two decades.

“Fewer Births Than Deaths Among Whites in Majority of U.S. States” (NYT, June 2018):

Deaths now outnumber births among white people in more than half the states in the country, demographers have found, signaling what could be a faster-than-expected transition to a future in which whites are no longer a majority of the American population.

The Census Bureau has projected that whites could drop below 50 percent of the population around 2045, a relatively slow-moving change that has been years in the making. But a new report this week found that whites are dying faster than they are being born now in 26 states, up from 17 just two years earlier, and demographers say that shift might come even sooner.

“Why the Announcement of a Looming White Minority Makes Demographers Nervous” (November 2018):

For white nationalists, it signifies a kind of doomsday clock counting down to the end of racial and cultural dominance. For progressives who seek an end to Republican power, the year points to inevitable political triumph, when they imagine voters of color will rise up and hand victories to the Democratic Party.

Of course, the mass shooting was a terrible event and directed against non-elites who had no role in creating our open borders nor the economic policies that have reduced fertility among working class whites. (chart source)

(According to the chart, the best times to have kids are when you’re on welfare and when you’re rich. Note that there are a lot more poor people than rich people and, therefore, the United States is becoming increasingly a society of the children of the poor. See The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications and The Son Also Rises: Policy Implications for what that might mean.)

The New York Times blames “far-right online platforms” for spreading this “racist belief” (5/14/2022):

The idea that white people should fear being replaced by “others” has spread through far-right online platforms, shaping discussions among American white nationalists, The Times has reported.

Should the paper look at its own triumphalist articles?

Circling back to the tragedy in Buffalo, are there any lessons to be learned? Republicans are often blamed for insufficiently restrictive gun laws, but New York State is free of political influence by Republicans. The perpetrator was mentally ill, but we don’t have effective treatments for mental illness. Two years of school lockdowns and mask orders probably did not improve his mental condition (he reportedly wore a hazmat suit to school for a week). Maybe he would have been happier if his parents had moved him to Florida. I see a fair number of mixed-skin-color teenage voluntary gatherings. Black guys in their 20s and 30s here generally refer to me as “brother”. I have not determined whether it is acceptable to reciprocate.

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UniFi versus Araknis versus Ruckus

by philg

Our old apartment was small enough that the AT&T Fiber-supplied modem covered the entire space with awesome WiFi. The new house is just a little too big for a single base station to cover reliably and is currently suffering from Xfinity cable Internet with two Xpods (Comcast’s own mesh networking device, comparable to Eero; so we have three access points including the modem/base). The system does not seem reliable and oftentimes devices are not connected to the nearest pod, but rather are trying to talk to the base station.

The house was built in 2003 and has a fair number of CAT5 runs, many of them never terminated. My plan is the following:

  • return the rented Xfinity modem/WiFi router and replace with a Motorola MB8611 that can be mounted to a wall near where the cable comes in and the CAT5 wires gather (don’t want to put this in a cabinet because it can draw 15 watts)
  • install a compact 16-port Power-over-Ethernet switch in the A/V wall cabinet where the CAT5 wires come in (the cabinet is 14″ wide by 19″ high and 3.5″ deep; it has a cover that can be left off for cooling, but has no provision for airflow); The UniFi Switch Lite is an example of something that would fit (only 7×7″) and will drive half the ports with power.
  • give the Xpods away to a neighbor
  • install three WiFi access points inside the house and one outside, all driven by PoE; maybe something like the UniFi “mesh” access point?

The neighborhood is packed with busy physicians and dentists who apparently aren’t capable of watching TV or getting an iPhone online without significant assistance. (By contrast, none of our neighbors in the apartment building reported any trouble getting everything that they wanted from AT&T!) It is common to see A/V service providers’ trucks, therefore, and when I ask them what they install for network hardware the answer is always “Ruckus and Araknis,” never the brands that I’ve used before (Cisco, Netgear, Linksys). One installer said that the Ruckus gear is used by municipalities to provide public WiFi (not by the Palm Beach County Schools, apparently, since the other night the guest network was non-functional and also Verizon mobile data was unusable, as is typical in Jupiter) and that he likes it because his company logs in every morning to each client’s house to make sure that all of the equipment is operating properly and has the latest software updates applied.

Readers who are networking experts: What is the correct solution for a standard McMansion like ours? UniFi, Araknis, Ruckus, or “other”? We don’t want to pay an A/V firm to log in every day and, in fact, don’t need any capability of remote management (though maybe it would be nice if we have a house-sitter and the network fails?).

A Reddit thread on this subject:

Ruckus is professional wireless networking. Good stuff but you pay for it.

As for Araknis I have to ask how you even heard of it. Are you dealing with an A/V installer? If so they are trying to scam you. Araknis is mediocre quality gear sold only through “dealers” at crazy prices. They target people who want to throw money at problems instead of doing any research.

An advantage of UniFi for me is that a friend has a big setup and is an expert on configuration. At a minimum, I think that I want to pay an A/V company to do the CAT5 terminations and clean-up in the A/V cabinet. A degree in electrical engineering does not imply skill at CAT5 crimping compared to someone who does it all day every day.

From a security point of view, is remote management a feature or a bug? Xfinity can presumably log every web site that we visit, but why create additional opportunities for individuals or governments to see that, for example, household members are viewing misinformation on a Muskified Twittter?

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The funniest Twitter exchanges are misunderstandings?

by philg

I’m still trying to figure out what Twitter is for. Much more so than Facebook, Twitter seems to bring together people with different backgrounds and perspectives. The result is a lot more misunderstandings and opportunities for humor with fake misunderstandings.

Here’s my own example:

The Harvard Medical School professor says, presumably informed by Science, that COVID-19 spreads because of arrogant, dismissive, and selfish people. I look at the map and sincerely point out that “Looks like arrogant, dismissive, and selfish people like to live in San Francisco, Boston, and New York City. #Science”.

On further reflection, it would have been better without the #Science and maybe rephrased “Looking at the map, it seems that …” But until Elon Musk takes over, there is no edit button!

Here’s one where President Biden promises more good stuff free and/or cheap and a subject ungratefully demands to know how the Vanquisher of Corn Pop is vanquishing the “housing crisis”:

Here’s the misunderstanding-based response:

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Real estate market has peaked? (that $3.225 million house in our neighborhood)

by philg

From early March… Open house today in our neighborhood:

There’s a house for sale in our neighborhood (we rent a 2BR for $2800/month). It went on the market about a week ago. The first showings are today, 10a-4p, and “All contracts must be submitted by 5:00pm on March 3rd.” This million dollar home (built in 2012; re-sold in 2017 for $1.3 million) sits on a princely quarter-acre lot and offers a vast interior space of 4,574′. It was “coming soon” at $2.95 million two weeks ago, but the asking price now is $3.225 million (escaping NY, MA, and CA vaccine coercion and mask orders is not cheap!). The house comes with the opportunity for a lifetime close friendship with the appliance repair brothers, sisters, and binary resisters (i.e., there is a Sub-Zero fridge).

Zillow estimates the value at $2.225 million. Redfin admits “we don’t have enough information to generate an accurate estimate at this time.”

Zillow now says that the estimated value is $2.54 million and also that the house finally closed on May 9 at $3 million.

My theory is that the real estate market peaked in February 2022. The above failure to achieve asking price is a small data point in favor of this theory. The bigger data point is that… I made the decision to buy a house in February 2022. If I go long, that’s a signal to go short! (“I like to do everything in the dumbest way imaginable”) My feeble justifications: our rent was likely to go up to $5,000 per month in August; the mortgage on a house more than 2X the size (using the 3.25 percent rate that we locked in back in Feb) is about $10,000 per month (but not cheaper per square foot once you factor in property tax, maintenance costs, and unpaid maintenance and management labor); kids won’t have to share a bedroom; we now have a real guest bedroom; more kids in the immediate neighborhood. The house is still in the same Abacoa neighborhood that was developed by the MacArthur Foundation (search process explained).

(We just recently closed and moved in, so be prepared for numerous posts on systems and maintenance! My productive hours per week have been cut by 40. There are daily trips to Home Depot. One recent day I counted five different contractors/service people who showed up.)

Who wants to guess at the real estate price trend for the next 2 years? My guess is that house prices will fall, but not by falling. The price in 2 years will be the same as the price today (maybe with a dip in the middle), but inflation will have eroded the value in real terms by at least 10 percent.

Even if you overpaid by $1 million for a house, one great thing about this climate is that you can grow orchids by wiring them to a tree and walking away. The tree gives the orchid sufficient shade and the orchid gets everything else that it needs from the Florida sky. A neighbor’s house this morning:

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Migrant minors tested for age in Belgium

by philg

An article from Belgium, translated from French by The Google, “Eight objectives to streamline the approach to unaccompanied foreign minors”:

Today, 2670 young people are welcomed in the Fedasil network and by the communities, compared to 1029 in 2019. In 2021, Belgium saw a total of 3351 young people who declared themselves minors. The Guardianship Service of the FPS Justice carried out 2515 age tests to verify these declarations. In total, 2435 decisions were made: at the end of the test, 69% were declared major and 31% were declared minors.

If migrants are undocumented, how can an “age test” be performed?

(Based on the folks whom I’ve talked to, the U.S. doesn’t try to do this. A migrant who identifies him/her/zir/theirself as a minor is a minor.)

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How will we pay for our mail order fentanyl now that crypto is cratering?

by philg

“Cryptocurrencies Melt Down in a ‘Perfect Storm’ of Fear and Panic” (NYT, today):

A steep sell-off that gained momentum this week starkly illustrated the risks of the experimental and unregulated digital currencies.

The problem is not that a string of random bits has no inherent value, in other words, but that the U.S. government is not regulating Bitcoin.

(For those that argue that fiat currency has no inherent value… you need it to pay your taxes, without which you will be put in prison. So its inherent value is at least whatever your freedom is worth to you.)

The price of Bitcoin plunged to its lowest point since 2020. Coinbase, the large cryptocurrency exchange, tanked in value. A cryptocurrency that promoted itself as a stable means of exchange collapsed. And more than $300 billion was wiped out by a crash in cryptocurrency prices since Monday.

The crypto world went into a full meltdown this week in a sell-off that graphically illustrated the risks of the experimental and unregulated digital currencies. Even as celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and tech moguls like Elon Musk have talked up crypto, the accelerating declines of virtual currencies like Bitcoin and Ether show that, in some cases, two years of financial gains can disappear overnight.

The moment of panic amounted to the worst reset in cryptocurrencies since Bitcoin plummeted 80 percent in 2018.

It recovered from the 2018 crash so we just have to buy and hold? 16 percent of Americans agree:

During the coronavirus pandemic, people have flooded into virtual currencies, with 16 percent of Americans now owning some, up from 1 percent in 2015, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Big banks like Northern Trust and Bank of America also streamed in, along with hedge funds, some using debt to further juice their crypto bets.

But crypto’s decline is more severe than the broader plunge in the stock market. While the S&P 500 is down 18 percent so far this year, Bitcoin’s price has dropped 40 percent in the same period. In the last five days alone, Bitcoin has tumbled 20 percent, compared to a 5 percent decline in the S&P 500.

Let’s go back to January 2021 when I wrote Bitcoin being pumped up a fraudulent Tether? Bitcoin was then valued at $36,000. Today it is quoted at approximately 30,000 Bidies (mini dollars). How’s Tether doing? Actually not too bad!

This week, Luna lost almost its entire value. That immediately had a knock-on effect on TerraUSD, which fell to a low of 23 cents on Wednesday. As investors panicked, Tether, the most popular stablecoin and a linchpin of crypto trading, also wavered from its own $1 peg. Tether fell as low as $0.95 before recovering. (Tether is backed by cash and other traditional assets.)

Regulators say that more regulation is the answer:

“We really need a regulatory framework,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said at a congressional hearing on Thursday. “In the last couple of days, we’ve had a real-life demonstration of the risks.”

Why would it make sense for the folks in Washington, D.C., who have failed to maintain a stable value for the U.S. dollar, to try to monkey with Bitcoin? People who want a currency that is subject to the regulation and manipulation of technocrats in D.C. already have one: the U.S. dollar.

Would any HODL readers like to make the case for buying cryptocurrencies right now? If so, which one(s)?

Crypto Believer at the local strip mall this evening… (I was at PetSmart)

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Should the COVID-19 injections be renamed to something other than “vaccine”?

by philg

When coronapanic hit and various public health prophets went on television calling themselves “scientists,” friends who are medical school professors said that, when the predictions of these physicians and public health bureaucrats inevitably failed the public’s confidence in medicine would be reduced. They cringed every time Anthony Fauci was in the spotlight, for example.

I wonder if the same thing could be happening with the shots that are currently marketed as “vaccines”. People who’ve had 3 or 4 shots are regularly getting sick with COVID-19. Some are being hospitalized and, in the long run, nearly all of the COVID-19 deaths will be among this heavily-jabbed population. By contrast, the childhood vaccines that we desperately want people to apply to their kids, e.g., the measles vaccine, actually stop humans from getting sick with measles.

Now that we know that COVID-19 vaccines don’t work like “regular vaccines” is it time to rename them so that their ineffectiveness doesn’t tarnish the reputation of the “real vaccines”?

Ignoring any serious harm that the COVID-19 vaccines might cause, the closest analogy that I can think of to the situation is what we call “the flu shot”. Americans don’t usually say “I am vaccinated against influenza.” We say “I had all of my childhood vaccinations and this year I got a flu shot.” The flu shot is put in a “can’t hurt; might help” category. When a person who had the flu shot gets the flu anyway, that doesn’t result in him/her/zir/them or his/her/zir/their social network to lose confidence in “vaccine vaccines.”

Readers: What do you think of the idea? Half of the hardest core Mask and Vaccine Karens whom I know seem to have gotten COVID-19 within the past few months. Wouldn’t the overall image of vaccines be improved if we said “They had a COVID-19 shot, which was good prep for their COVID-19 infection” rather than “They were vaccinated against COVID-19 three times and then got COVID-19 anyway”?

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