Those in poverty usually have more children. Woman having more rights and joining the workforce is probably a major cause; which is probably why there’s all this money backing taking away women’s rights recently. Another major cause is likely isolation and lack of community in modern life (“it takes a village…”).

I doubt that. Current conventional food production is highly fossil fuel dependant (everything from fertilizer to processing to transport). Earth’s ariable land and top soil is decreasing quickly. Ecosystems are collapsing from the effects of agriculture and climate change. Most “advances” require more inputs and energy, which means more fossil fuel use, further accelerating resource degredation and climate change. I forget the statistic, but humans already control a significant proportion of Earth’s biomass. This chart from https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/17788/how-much-of-earths-biomass-is-affected-by-humans/ might be what I was thinking of:

I think most people are a little better off. They just don’t feel like it, because most people still aren’t doing “well.” I.e. things aren’t getting better fast enough. I looked at real-wage statistics a while back, and that seemed to confirm my beliefs (real wages have been improving across all four quantiles). I have not looked at those living on SSI, SSD, or retirement; and I imagine those people could be worse off.

The current job market is still very tight, unemployment is still very low (despite the Fed). Recent mass layoffs have mostly just been in tech and some white collar jobs, which is a small fraction of the workforce/electorate. The majority of people work “unskilled” jobs and those are still easy to get, and pay a little more in real wages now.

None of this really matters to the electorate though. I’m convinced elections are all vibes-based. And vibes are largely controlled by the media and algorithms. I’ve recently talked to a few people that want Trump to win, and they still parotted the line, “Trump is a business man, so he knows how to get the economy back on track.” They also liked the checks they got during the lockdown. They don’t really follow the news or politics, so all the information they get is incidental. One person recently started to get into red-pill content (Fresh + Fit, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, etc), who I think also discuss political issues in a vibes-based way.

Kagi is pretty good, but expensive. I like that listicles are put in their own small section so you can ignore them. You can boost, pin, demote, or block results from certain domains. You can create and quickly switch between domain list presets to search only specific sets of sites. The only thing I don’t like is the exerpts below results don’t bold what you’re looking for like Google does.

Yeah, local jails are bad, and juvenile facilities are even worse. Been in both (but luckily not a federal facility).

The entire criminal justice system in the U.S. is evil. It’s all about money and retributive “justice” to get votes/campaign money. It serves no purpose otherwise, because it sure as hell ain’t built to rehabilitate people. Any attention to the wrongs of the system is welcome, IMO.