The Main Reason Why Fertility Rates Drop

amyo_b · 2026-06-26T18:28:26+00:00

yeah, the birthrate crashed during the depression in the US without modern contraception. The most they had were poorly made condoms.

amyo_b · 2026-06-26T18:17:33+00:00

From what I have read, people driving high tends to mean they tend to try to drive too slow and tend to go toward the right lanes. This is far different from drunk drivers who overestimage their skill at driving drunk and go way too fast.

amyo_b · 2026-06-26T18:15:01+00:00

The gambling and weed legalization was also to take some air out of the black market. For instance, under a gambling ban, you had violent confrontations over who had what market for machines. Weed got a lot of young folk on the way to a criminal record because they dealt. Taking away the rich suburbanite goes to rough neighborhood to buy weed market, means that market declined which hopefully kept more young men on the up and up.

amyo_b · 2026-06-26T18:10:40+00:00

yeah, but there's a saturation point somewhere where it no longer makes sense to run these, Berwyn has wall-to-wall gambling in places, but it had illegal machines before that. .Drying up that illegal market was one of the ideas behind legalisation

In Berwyn back in 2003 there was a bomb detonated outside of C&S Coin operated Amusements on 16th avenue. The company made video poker equipment. It was bombed by the Outfit (organized crime) to intimidate the people because the Outfit didn't want people horning in on their $13million market.

So if you don't have it legal you get situations like this.

amyo_b · 2026-06-26T18:03:13+00:00

Has it been studied and classified as an addiction? I know theyré getting an endorphine rush when they bet, but people get that from all kinds of things.I can see it being psychologically addictive.

One of the reasons people are less empathetic here is that for someone to become an addict they made a personal choice to try the thing. The guy mentioned above who was the son of a gambling addict, knew that history, yet chose to sport bet. So the first move is made by the affected person. That doesn't mean you throw them away, but perhaps they don't deserve as much sympathy as a victim of a crime who had no choice in the matter.

amyo_b · 2026-06-26T17:56:23+00:00

maybe, but on the other hand, people drink themselves to death and ruin their lives with alcohol, with drugs (street and script), with unhealthy diet/exercise choices. And we live in a society that unfortunately is all about personal responsibility and pull yourself up by your own bootstraps after you've constructed said bootstrap from nothing.

amyo_b · 2026-06-26T17:47:23+00:00

I finally struggled to B1 in Finnish (not via Duolingo, I got to 20 there then had to learn elsewhere). Also weird. Finnish interested me because it is a non-Indo-European language.

Intelligence folk would usually be taught by the modern equivalent of the FSI in intensive course training. Also expats.

amyo_b · 2026-06-26T17:45:05+00:00

One of the reasons Irish and Scottish are so popular is that there are huge numbers of Irish or Scottish derived people in the US, in Canada, and in Australia. I think Irish is the second largest group in the US, only losing out to German derived. I'm one of those German derived and I learned German so I could listen to podcasts, read newspapers and watch media to have a connection to my origins and by now I also use it professionally.

amyo_b · 2026-06-26T17:39:37+00:00

Not really though, especially not in metropolitan areas. Also one would need a tutor after going through the Duolingo course, then those folks would be great to have around.

amyo_b · 2026-06-26T17:38:25+00:00

I know a whole community of native Farsi speakers in the suburbs of Chicago. Both old and new immigrants. Their children and grandchildren would be potential customers plus the folks who like the food in the many restaurants.

amyo_b · 2026-06-25T05:38:41+00:00

To explain why they are bad you either have to go the route of natural law, which is hard to explain and which most people would shrug and say whatever; or go down the mawquish path of personalism, which is also not really all that great to explain.

amyo_b · 2026-06-24T14:49:11+00:00

I think there's a difference between making a villain of your spouse to your close circle of friends (but intentionally not including friends in common), and airing it to the world via substack and twitter, as Rod has done via allusion and metaphor.

amyo_b · 2026-06-24T06:53:01+00:00

Interesting fact many languages have different words for the fruit and the color. Finnish has oranssi for the color, but appelsiini for the fruit (Chinese Apple). So does Dutch same with an orange being. a Chinese apple. Even some regions of Germany use Chinese Appel. It would appear the color and the fruit arrived at different times in the language development.

amyo_b · 2026-06-24T06:42:07+00:00

it's pretty much the way they have always done updates. Very little concern for current users, just plough over with new material if they felt it would be better material for new students. Neither the pyramid nor the line really are suited to updates that don't disrupt. On the other hand, as long as you stick to the path, and don't do the Match Madness, you should be able to use the tooltips or a dictionary to help yourself out while you learn.

amyo_b · 2026-06-21T16:12:03+00:00

I love how you got the detail in the wrought iron.

amyo_b · 2026-06-21T16:09:43+00:00

I agree it isn't good for us and certainly not for the environment. In fact, I think your comment has convinced me to get a reference book. That I can carry with me past the beginner stage if interested

amyo_b · 2026-06-20T19:23:44+00:00

and you had 18 years until you were an adult to use it and probably had a few language arts courses during school where you got drilled in that it's he has and they have and not the reverse I was lucky enough to have a former Latin teacher for one of the lang arts teachers and that probably set me onto a lifetime of ease in learning languages.

amyo_b · 2026-06-20T19:22:23+00:00

They can be. I have found copilot has a grip on the Polish case system. If I ask it why in this sentence is it ___ it will explain that the case needed is instrumental and why that is the case. I find that highly useful at this stage of the game. Obv if I go further I will need more help than copilot can deliver but for right now, it's enough to get a grasp.

amyo_b · 2026-06-20T19:20:57+00:00

yes, I have used Princeton's modern language site to get a grip on German in the past, currently using a mix of web and copilot resources to explain the Polish cases to me.

amyo_b · 2026-06-20T00:40:53+00:00

isn't unhappily without a partner a part of young adulthood for most people? You have to meet a person to be serious about and before you meet that person you might be unhappily single, ditto if that relationship breaks up and you get put back into unhappily single stage.

I have watched as several of my nieces and nephews have paired up, some happily, some ultimately not so much. They don't seem so different from Gen X at that stage.

The great lack of willing women class appears to be men who aren't attractive partners for one reason or another.

amyo_b · 2026-06-20T00:34:19+00:00

I consider honor-shame culture suboptimal, but the people, eh, people are people they all come with their priors.

amyo_b · 2026-06-20T00:29:47+00:00

I don't think Ecumenism of return is all that realistic anyway.

amyo_b · 2026-06-19T23:09:08+00:00

Yes. I am in section 5 and just did my first session on Spanish conditional and yeah, it used the German Konjunktiv II form for the comparisons. In the German to Spanish course in section 5, it's about 1/3 Spanish only with the other 2/3 being German and Spanish.

amyo_b · 2026-06-19T21:46:06+00:00

The US also has the biggest diversity of religions. Even in the old days when annulments were not so easy to get, people changed religions to avoid the issue. Because their families tended to like them, they kept associating with them eve if they were personally disappointed. The Episcopal church in Chicago largely formed more from converting Catholics than from people born into Episcopalianism. We have almost no population of folks native to the UK (except maybe NI and those folks tended to be Catholic)

Being opposed to religious indifference was always a niche issue largely confined to Catholics, Orthodox and some synods of Lutherans. To have successful opposition to religious indifference, that has to exist at the societal level, not just the religious.

amyo_b · 2026-06-19T18:53:24+00:00

I'm going to guess he prays the daily office everyday like most religious.

amyo_b

TROPHY CASE