We Need More Kids

[bilby]

No sex workers. Biologists, energy experts, and programmers.

Bill Gates clearly doesn't undrrstand humanity very well. AI cannot replace sex workers, drug dealers, judges, or revolutionaries.

I see few obstacles to AI biologists, or energy experts. And programmers are already becoming the first against the wall. I suspect that most white collar workers, if asked for a list of three, would include their own speciality in the list.

What we see here is that (like most experts, and indeed, most humans) Gates massively underestimates the difficulty of jobs that aren't his, while overestimating the difficulty of jobs he has, himself, done (or been closely associated to).

I find that I get far more respect from the wider public for being a bus driver than I ever got for being a production planner. This is not because the latter is easier than the former; Both require similar mental effort (measured by the highly scientific "how tired is my brain when I get home?" methodology). The respect comes because people think they understand bus driving - it's an obviously more challenging version of a task that most people perform themselves.

 

[laughing dog]

I noticed that Bill Gates (one of Musk's fellow centibillionaires)

Can we please stop abusing the poor centi- prefix?

A centimetre is one hundredth of a metre.

A centibillionaire would therefore have in the order of ten million dollars.

A hundred metres is a hectometre.

A person with hundreds of billions of dollars is therefore a hectobillionaire.

What the cent heck is so hard about this??

The metric system is for sissies. The english system equivalent of he to billionaire is gazillionaire.

 

[bilby]

I have, and am almost certain to continue to have, zero kids.

But my parents have four grandchildren, so I am doing my bit to ensure that my genes continue their three and a half billion years of success, by supporting my nephew and nieces.

And by supporting all the other eight billion or so Homo Sapiens, who are all carrying all but a vanishingly trivial number of my genes. And by supporting the kingdom Animalia, who are all carrying most of my genes. And the plants, who carry a lot of my genes; And even the Bacteria, and other remote branches of my family tree (many of whom I only mention under protist).

 

[Swammerdami]

Spoiler alerts:
1. Some English words have more than one (1) definition.
2. A centipede is NOT a creature with 1/100 of a leg.
3. A centillion is 1000^101 in America and 1000000^100 in France. It is NOT 1000^(-1/100) or whatever bilby thinks it "should" be.

I noticed that Bill Gates (one of Musk's fellow centibillionaires)

Can we please stop abusing the poor centi- prefix?

A centimetre is one hundredth of a metre.

A centibillionaire would therefore have in the order of ten million dollars.

A hundred metres is a hectometre.

A person with hundreds of billions of dollars is therefore a hectobillionaire.

What the cent heck is so hard about this??

You've stated this opinion before. Will I be accused of sadism if I confess that I expected you would probably repeat your opinion again?

Scrabble players and Jotto players, etc. first agree on a dictionary to use. It sounds like we need one also.
The English dictionaries I use most frequently are Google's and wiktionary. What dictionary do you propose?

centi-
/ˈsen(t)i/
combining form
prefix: centi-

1. (in units of measurement) one hundredth.​

"centiliter"​

2. (in units of measurement) hundred.​

"centigrade"​

Prefix
...
centi-

1. one-hundredth​

(specifically) In the International System of Units and other metric systems of units, multiplying the unit to which it is attached by 10^-2​

.​

2. hundred​

Synonyms: hecato-, hecto-​

centimillionaire​

Hope this helps.

 

[Bullmoose Too]

We need, as a species, to give up the idea of endless economic growth. The Earth cannot support it. We could, OTOH, also make an effort to maker life as pleasant as possible for the existing population.

The very few members of our species that actually belief in unlimited growth are the ones that would benefit from it. Like Elon Musk.

Edit: If us humans believed in unlimited growth as a species then our population would be much higher.

 

[bilby]

2. A centipede is NOT a creature with 1/100 of a leg.

Nor do any centipedes have 100 legs, so clearly the name is not intended to be mathematically accurate.

 

[bilby]

A centillion is 1000^101 in America and 1000000^100 in France.

A centillion is nothing at all in English; It's an obscure word used by nobody. At a guess, it's someone who rings church bells?

"The Queen has given birth to a new prince! Call the centillion, and have him spread the news to the people"

 

[Bronzeage]

There is a white elephant in the room, which is to say, the wrong people are having kids. This is not too far away from a bunch of wannabe tough guys parading with Tiki torches and chanting "Jews will not replace us".

The wailing about economic realities and the rational choices it presents to young parents, misses the point. Elon and his crew have no interest improving circumstances which would make having more children a more appealing choice. What they want, but aren't willing to sacrifice to to obtain it, is a larger white working poor class. This would relieve them of the indignity of having to a van load of brown people stop by once a week to mow the lawn and trim the hedges.

Someone with assets of only a quarter-billion or so is not in Musk's league; such a man may not even own a private jet or a super-yacht. But by the time one gets to Musk's level, material wants are satisfied and POWER -- specifically the power associated with wealth and income disparity -- is the goal. If automation means there aren't enough decent-wage jobs to go around in an over-populated world, that's a feature, not a bug, for Elon Musk and his ilk.

- - - - - - - - - -

I noticed that Bill Gates (one of Musk's fellow centibillionaires) thinks that only three careers will survive the current onslaught of automation and AI. I was curious what the three careers were -- would sex workers be one? -- so I clicked.

No sex workers. Biologists, energy experts, and programmers.

A sex worker is a kind of biologist.

My prediction for lucrative careers is maintenance, repair, and scrap metal.

 

[Swammerdami]

2. A centipede is NOT a creature with 1/100 of a leg.

Nor do any centipedes have 100 legs, so clearly the name is not intended to be mathematically accurate.

I felt a need to explore this pressing topic. Let's start with a video of a centipede from the species who frequented our home in the Degraded Forest. At the 0:54 mark in the video the centipede encounters and takes down a tarantula. These creatures move very quickly and when one was stalking our baby I did not pause to count its legs. If Omnigog did create such creatures with a full complement of 100 legs, I'm glad Noah left them behind with the unicorns when he was populating his famous Super-yacht. (The centipede in the video and the ones in our orchard are in genus Scolopendra. IIRC I once knew the exact species, but seem to have repressed this knowledge.)

Despite the name, no species of centipede has exactly 100 legs; the number of pairs of legs is an odd number that ranges from 15 pairs to 191 pairs.

Thanks a lot. I didn't know some centipedes had as many as 282 legs! Now I'm going to have nightmares. (In any event Wikipedia doesn't mention any variety with just 1/100 of a leg.)

Inexactness in numbering and measurements has been a feature of human society ever since Oog tried to impress Oona by bragging about the size of his pleasure instrument.

As another example:

In the Roman infantry, the centurions commanded a centuria or "century". During the Mid-Republic these centuries were grouped in pairs to make up a maniple, each century consisting of 30–60 men.[1] After the so-called "Marian reforms", a century was typically composed of around 80 men, with six such centuries forming a cohort.[2]

We'll need a citation for your claim that a Roman centurion commanded 1/100 of a soldier.

"The Queen has given birth to a new prince! Call the centillion, and have him spread the news to the people"

"Centillion" gets lots of Google hits; several corporations have adopted it as part of their name, and many sites feel a need to define this term. Nasdaq.Com has an entry for "centillion" in its glossary. I'm not sure if the term was needed by an optimist who thinks the Dow-Jones Average will continue its soar toward a pinnacle rivaling Oog's instrument in grandeur. Or by a pessimist who envisions hyperinflation.

On 11 July 1946, the Hungarian National Bank released the last pengő banknotes, for 100 million B-pengős (10²⁰ = 100 quintillion); the Bank also printed banknotes for one billion B-pengős (10²¹ = one sextillion), but they never entered circulation.[9] The last adópengő banknote, for 100000000 adópengős, followed on 25 July, and was equal to 200 octillion pengős (2×10²⁹ = 200 billion billion billion) on 31 July.

Had the inflation continued at the rate in July 1946, by 1948 they would have needed 303 zeroes. (Conceptually. In fact they used color codes to avoid some of the zeroes.)

Finally let's dispense with the notion that a centillion is too large a number to be useful.
* There are more than a centillion distinct RNA sequences of the length needed to code for a protein of a mere 168 amino acids.
* There are roughly a centillion slots in your fully expanded pedigree even if you don't record ancestors more distant than the Late Paleolithic.
* My friend has calculated upper and lower bounds for the number of possible Go games. 10^googol is a number roughly "splitting the difference" between the bounds. No, not "googol" -- roughly the cube root of centillion and a tiny number in this context -- 10^googol.

 

[southernhybrid]

We sure are good at going off topic. What exactly do centipedes have to do with having more human babies, and what does the metric system have to do with having more babies.? The numerical systems used by different countries is just cultural. Get over it and have a few ounces or about 60 grams of chocolate to sweeten up your day.

 

[WAB]

We sure are good at going off topic. What exactly do centipedes have to do with having more human babies, and what does the metric system have to do with having more babies.? The numerical systems used by different countries is just cultural. Get over it and have a few ounces or about 60 grams of chocolate to sweeten up your day.

I knew the metric system would eventually start to cause problems...

 

[pood]

I think we need more dogs, not kids.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Spoiler alerts:
1. Some English words have more than one (1) definition.

You think that's bad. If your employer tells you, you get a paycheck bi-weekly, you think that probably means every other week. If they tell you you get a paycheck bi-monthly, you think that probably means approximately every other week.

 

[pood]

And if they tell you they’re sanctioning you, you don’t know whether they mean helping or hurting you. Love contronyms.

 

[WAB]

And cleave means to split apart AND to stick together.

 

[southernhybrid]

In an attempt to sort of get back on topic, I will share an article from the Times that is related to this s subject. I had thought of starting a thread based on the article, but since it is about having more babies, it will fit in here. That is unless you all start talking about centipedes again.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/23/...e_code=1.SE8.uVQs.Zld-osDYBbiA&smid=url-share

“I’ll tell you this ladies,” said Dana Loesch, former spokeswoman of the National Rifle Association, as she paced the stage of a Dallas ballroom. “You cannot have it all — at the same time. Something will suffer.”

The audience of roughly 3,000 young women listened, rapt. They wore pins that read “Dump your socialist boyfriend” and “My favorite season is the fall of feminism.” In ruffled sundresses and cowboy boots, they shimmied to the “Church Clap.” When Ms. Loesch stepped off the stage, and out came Trump World rock stars Charlie and Erika Kirk, the young women came up to the microphone one by one to ask for advice — on finding a husband, on raising Christian children, on what to tell friends who judged them for wanting to marry young.

“I must have missed it in Matthew — which is ‘Go forth and become C.E.O. of a shoe company,’” Mr. Kirk told the audience, voice inlaid with an eye roll.

It was the largest young conservative women’s event in the country, hosted by Turning Point USA, the organization Mr. Kirk leads that claimed a critical role in turning out young voters for President Trump. Most attendees had come to the Young Women’s Leadership Summit not so much for advice on how to lead, but how to live. Because sure, the personal is political — but it’s also practical, palatable. They got clear marching orders. “Less Prozac, more protein,” said Alex Clark, a wellness influencer and podcast host who headlined the weekend. “Less burnout, more babies, less feminism, more femininity.”

Rhaelynn Zito is one such conservative convert. Ms. Zito is a 25-year-old nurse who lives in Raleigh, N.C. In 2023, she said, she had a real belly flop of a year. She went through a breakup, lost a family member and was searching for purpose outside work. Ms. Zito began listening to Ms. Clark, whose Turning Point USA show is often ranked among the top 10 of health podcasts on Spotify.

Listening to Ms. Clark, Ms. Zito said, changed her life. She started a Bible study group, cut down her drinking and stopped dating casually as she focused on finding a husband. She stopped using birth control, taking up a natural family planning method recommended on Ms. Clark’s show, and became dubious about abortions and vaccines. She no longer identifies as a feminist.

One after another, members of the audience came forward to ask Mr. Kirk and his wife for advice. No questions on politics, he told them, only relationships, faith and parenting. “I don’t want to go to college and I don’t want to commit to a career that I know I’m going to abandon once I have kids,” one young woman said, to which Mr. Kirk replied: “You’re already thinking correctly.” Mrs. Kirk asked if anybody in the room had a liberal boyfriend. A hand near the front shot up. “Pray for her!” an audience member yelled.

There's a lot more in this disturbing article that I hope you will read.

I hope this movement dies out. My mom who was born in 1925 was a working mom and I was proud of her for that. She was also very religious, so why can't a woman work and go to church if that's what she wants? She had 3 kids, not unusual back in the 50s. She did put up with my mentally ill difficult father, but I think she really loved him. She never criticized me for having only one child or for divorcing my first husband who was a very unloving person. She loved my current husband despite the fact that we are both atheists, and he loved her too.

This have more baby movement is sickening, especially since it encourages women not to work and be totally dependent on a man. And, what are these women to do if the man leaves them or dies and they have no work experience. Okay. That's my rant regarding this sickening movement.

 

[pood]

To paraphrase a judge’s ruling on Joyce’s Ulysses, this organization and the people in it are emetic without providing an aphrodisiac.

 

[pood]

Read the whole article. God, that’s nauseating.

 

[pood]

Back in college we called such women mousewives. We thought they were disappearing. But hey, if you want to get hitched at nineteen and pump out a bunch of kids you may not be able to afford to raise because of the MAGA you support, and then watch your hubby ditch your for a prettier and younger airhead, be my guest. It’s your choice.

I also love this MAHA shit. So Orwellian.

 

[pood]

Get barefoot and go back in the kitchen, ladies, and make sure that tummy is always tumid with another bun in the oven to vote someday for misogynist Republicans!