“South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on February 13 ordered his administration to develop tax incentives and subsidies for companies that encourage their employees to have children.”
This seems fishy to me.
Why not develop tax incentives and subsidies for the parents directly, instead of giving companies another loophole?
South Korea is run by a handful of enormous family owned companies. This is probably related to the fertility rate.
You couldn’t pay me a million to make another being have to live on this planet.
This is the part I can’t get with all the moral panic. What sort of horrible person are you that you want to force other people to live this way? Isn’t inaction and breaking the cycle of violence and pain a better idea?
I actually think life, for all its faults, is a beautiful and amazing opportunity. It’s a special blink of existence where we get to witness the unimaginable beauty in our universe.
Perhaps our lives (in the West, at least) have gotten too easy. Not that I want to go back or live a harder life - I don’t. But for most of human history, there was a pretty solid chance you were going to live a sick, miserable, religion-filled life as a soldier, slave, or peasant. All the while, you’d have pretty much no control over what happened to you. Even the wealthy and powerful were shitting in holes and sweating in the heat. Today, it costs you about two hours of easy labor to get a bidet and maybe 10 hours of labor to get an air conditioner that will keep you cool for many years. People still found meaning and reasons to keep going through the thousands of years of famine, plague, war, and slavery. They kept seeing something that made them want to have babies and love them.
The world isn’t perfect but it’s better than it’s ever been in most ways. Even if we don’t survive climate change and late-stage capitalism, I think the time I’ve already had with my son has been beautiful and meaningful. I only hope he gets to experience love, satisfaction, simple pleasures, etc. Even just a comfortable nap or the feeling of accomplishment after completing a task. It’s all so fragile and temporary. We are the universe experiencing itself and it’s really beautiful despite the miserable parts.
Ok Carl Sagan you have a way with words and rock the leisure suit turtleneck combo but this isn’t the 90s anymore. It is 2024. The Middle East is on fire over who has the best skydaddy, American democracy has under a year left before the evangelicals start opening concentration camps, Russia is about finished up in Ukraine, and the PRC is going to make sure that there is one China soon.
So excuse me for not being hopeful when I am having to spend money and time making sure my daughters have citizenship in another country to flee to before we go all Gilead.
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