I have a well paying job, not overly so, but around 20% over the national median. I also have a wife and 1 (soon 2!) kids. I work 8-17 with a 30 minute commute. After work I’m too exhausted to want to do much of anything except some gym and maybe some gardening. Before I even got together with my wife she suggested that she be a stay at home mom, which I accepted. Because of that we are far far below the national median family income to the point where we technically are just below the poverty line.

But oh my god I don’t think I would want it any other way. My wife can take care of most of the domestic tasks and the brunt of the child care and none of us are overly stressed or burned out. I gladly take that hit in income in exchange for the huge quality of life increase compared to if we were to both work full time. I still help around the house on weekends so my wife can have some time off from her duties as well.

I constantly get more confident in our choice when I listen to colleagues and their constant complaints about how hard it is to keep your life together. Full time work, 8-9 hours a day, was designed in a time when a stay at home partner was the norm. It just doesn’t make sense if you’re single or if both are working. Maybe we two are lazy but I honestly don’t think we could manage it mentally and energy wise.

I do understand however that I’m very privileged to live in a very low cost of living area. Our lifestyle, with my wage, would be impossible in most of the country I live in. Living close to poverty is alright with me. I don’t desire much and we both have cheap hobbies. We cook all the food we eat. My wife repairs clothes that break. We only have one old shitty car. We don’t travel internationally. But we still manage just fine.

Yeah thinking about it using the lightning rune twice is really sus. Very hard to defend that.

I don’t have the email but I would assume those emojis in this case are Slavic neopaganist symbols, also known as rodnovery.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Rodnover_symbols

If you drank the unpasteurized mixed breast milk of a hundred human women I almost guarantee you will get sick. Any body fluid, from both humans and mammals, is a huge health risk in its raw form. Infants are OK because they only drink from one and whatever disease the mom has, the baby is almost guaranteed to have already got anyway from the constant close contact.

That would not be good. However the more common case of using raw flour is eating raw cookie dough. It’s not safe.

Having blood and puss in milk is surprisingly OK. That’s not an industrial problem, that’s just biological reality. However the amount is very low and not a health concern. There are just as much of those components in raw and pasteurized. The problem is that in the raw milk the bacteria still lives on.

It’s like how there is an acceptable limit to how many ground up cockroaches and mouse shits you’re allowed to have in wheat flour. If the level is low enough and you don’t eat the flour raw, there is no problem.

Don’t you have low temperature pasteurization in the US? It tastes basically the same as raw milk and has nowhere near the mailiard reaction impact that UHT has, meaning it should have basically the same nutrition as raw milk. Never understood the raw milk craze.

If you have encountered a harvest getting destroyed in a very short time before, I think you have a valid reason to use it preemptively. I don’t know too much about Neem oil actually but I know that in India they ingest it directly as a traditional medicine and that type of use has led to seizures and hormonal problems. I’m unsure how much of those effects transfer to use as pesticide on produce but I still wouldn’t spray lettuce with Neem oil that I’m planning to eat the next day. I would at least research its safety further before deciding.

Have you thought about netting? It’s very ugly but it’s quite effective, as long as you apply the netting before the pests have arrived on the plant. It’s one of those tricks that a small scale grower can use but large scale growers can’t.

Neem oil is a powerful insecticide and like most insecticides it’s quite harmful for us humans as well (organic or not). I would not go too crazy on the Neem oil, especially close to harvest. Is there any particular reason you’re using it preemptively instead of any time when you actually see pests on your plants? Have you had such bad problems before that you feel you really need to apply on a schedule?

What on earth? Works on my machine

Edit: oh I actually read the code and now I get that you are not replying back a error you got from my message…

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Once I was riding the bike during winter which I usually do. I went past a big frozen puddle and wondered over how everyone always says to never brake on the ice with a bike. I wondered how that actually feels like so I went super slow over the frozen puddle and started braking. Now I understand why people say that. I didn’t just fall off the bike. All the forward momentum I had was magically converted to sideways momentum and even though I was going really slow I still fell with rapid force on my side severely hurting my left elbow. I was bedridden for 2 weeks. Could barely go to the toilet. Absolutely unbelievably stupid. I hope this makes you feel any better.

If I’m to pay more for retirement because I don’t have kids, then why shouldn’t parents pay more for the education of their offspring?

You could absolutely argue that childcare and kindergarten are chiefly to the parents benefits but school is not. In fact when school was first made mandatory it was a huge blow to many parents as they lost another worker at home/ their farm. School is for the benefit of the children themselves and as a society at large. You benefit from kids being in school because you can live in a more educated society, also you yourself went to school so it’s only fair you pay for others to also go to school.

No that’s not what this is about. The government assumes that every child will pay taxes. Every less child born means a lesser future tax base for the future retired. In effect if you don’t have kids yourself you are relying on the taxes of other people’s kids to pay for your retirement.

That could also work but then we still have to increase the elder care tax as a whole. In the end the result is the same. Childless people pay more effective tax (taxes - benefits) than parents.

If the purpose of the law is strictly to compensate from the strain a childless person puts on the pension system, and not to simply punish them for not having kids. Then I don’t see the problem of involuntarily childless people getting taxed. The involuntarily and the voluntarily childless both get the same benefit of not having to pay for their kids and therefore would have the same ability to pay. And they both put the same strain on the pension system.

Taxing the rich is always good I agree. But regarding having kids only to avoid taxes. Do the pension payments really scale up to super rich level? Or do they have a max ceiling. I don’t know exactly how Germany does it. But yes if the pension payments scale linearly with income that could be a major issue that’s true.

Maybe I’m gonna be bashed for this but isn’t this a good solution? We can all agree that forcing people to have children is a bad idea. Most would also argue that the state has no role whatsoever in deciding if people have kids, they should merely make it possible for those who want to have kids, to have as many children that they want. A policy punishing those without kids could be unethical for many reasons.

However that’s not what this is about. This is merely about childless people contributing more to their pensions. Which I think is fair since by not having kids they put pressure on the pension system. Childless people also have more disposable income on average meaning they have the ability to pay this. However those childless people who are actually poor are not unfairly affected since this is paid on their income. Low income low pension payment. Isn’t this the least worst of all possible solutions? I would love a discussion on this because I find this topic very interesting. Please disagree with me on this and let me hear your thoughts!

Sorry but you just produced a whole lot of bullshit. You admit that maize is more productive than rice in the US and Canada. But you never reflect more on that. The reason that listed average yields for maize is lower than for rice in most other countries has a very simple explanation. Rice is higher value per kg and if you can grow rice in a certain environment, you are very likely to do so. Maize then gets pushed to less productive land that can’t support rice, either because it’s too mountainous or it’s too dry. However what we see is that when maize and rice are grown on the same land the maize tends to either yield similar or more than rice. A few years ago I made an agricultural study trip to Indonesia where they grew rice everywhere where rice could be grown but grew mostly maize on the rest of the land. Traditionally they used to have highland rice varieties that could be grown without irrigation but they were mostly abandoned when maize came, because it was far more productive. All animals where also fed maize because maize was cheaper to produce than rice. Even animal farmers whose grain never ended up in market, were growing maize to feed their chickens, because it yielded the most. Maize has 4C photosynthesis that’s more productive than rice’s 3C photosynthesis in subtropical and tropical climates.

Now the claim you make that maize uses 5x more fertilizer I have no idea where you got that from, but I’m guessing straight out of your ass. If we are talking nitrogen it’s about 22kg per ton for maize and 18kg per ton for rice. However since maize has a higher protein content the nitrogen use efficiency ends up being close to the same. And nowhere near the 5x fertiliser claim you pulled. You also briefly mention water but rice is almost universally irrigated while maize is chiefly rainfed.

I’m just replying to the comment above mine that says rice is not hurting the climate. That’s simply factually wrong. I’m also comparing rice to other grains, not rice to growing nothing at all. We could improve the climate impact of agriculture by switching to other carbs that are just as productive while having a lesser environmental impact, such as Maize and potatoes. However I don’t think we should actually do that as some people eat rice for cultural reasons and the impact rice has, as many have pointed out, is dwarfed by animal agriculture. So switching away from rice while still eating beef would feel a bit hypocritical. However it’s still true that rice is far from the most environmentally friendly carb source.