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Someone has to provide the goods and services you'll consume when you're old. Those people are today's kids, whose parents are doing you a big favor at consider

Someone has to provide the goods and services you'll consume when you're old. Those people are today's kids, whose parents are doing you a big favor at considerable expense to themselves. Raising children isn't like smoking, a hobby, a side hustle, or other miscellaneous personal obligations. It's more like military service and jury duty -- an essential service that some people perform to ensure that society as we know it can continue to exist. And one which employers can, should, and often do make special allowances for.

nickff 6y ago
Except that the children disproportionately benefit the parents (unlike jury duty or military service). This is a heads-parents-win, tails-childless-lose scenario. Your comment would be completely correct if the children ceased all communications and transactions with the parent upon entry into the labor force; but that's not what happens.
- polishdude20 6y ago
  Well in proportion to the time the parents spend with the kids vs the time you are inconvenienced by them spending time with their kids balances out. Of course they will have a huge benefit from raising their kids. They raised them. But you will also have a benefit from the small temporary hassle it gives you during these times.
  - nickff 6y ago
    I am not saying that parents do not deserve attention from their children, I am only making the point that the proposed benefits are disproportionately beneficial to parents.
    - polishdude20 6y ago
      I'm saying they are proportionally beneficial to the parents if the portion of time they spend with their kids is drastically higher than the portion of time you are inconvenienced by that act.
      - nickff 6y ago
        You are asserting that I have some duty to do favors for parents? Should I do their dry cleaning, and get them a coffee if it's 'more convenient' as well?
- newen 6y ago
  Well, your social security money will be coming directly from those kids working. Just one example of non-parents benefiting. In fact, your entire existence as an old person will be completely dependent on those kids working.
  - nickff 6y ago
    The comment I replied to said that parenthood was like military service or jury duty, whose residual benefits accrue equally to the entire populace, and I was simply pointing out that parenthood was different. Non-parents get many benefits from children, but the parents get far more. To be clear, I think many of the arguments for subsidizing the rearing of children are coherent, such as arguments in favor of public schooling and healthcare (on the basis that the children are the primary beneficiaries), but I think those arguments do not apply to the parents' workplace.
    - Tagbert 6y ago
      Yes, parent accrue more benefits from their children than do non-parents, but their investment is significantly higher than the minor difference in time off that you may see. Regardless of any direct benefit to me, I am willing to accept parents getting some small benefits that I will not as a childless person as an overall investment in society as a whole.
      - nickff 6y ago
        I don't think anyone here wants to prevent you from helping parents; the question is whether the case for 'societal investment' is clear and convincing enough to justify forcing everyone else to share the burden.
nicbou 6y ago
Then is it cool if I skip a few meetings to volunteer to help the homeless? We already heavily subsidise child-rearing through taxes and other benefits. As I said elsewhere, there are mechanisms for supporting parents already. If you tried to let any other charitable endeavour take over your work schedule, you wouldn't expect your compensation to remain unaffected. I'm not resentful at parents. It just seems completely unfair to make childless employees subsidise this adventure, as if they didn't already do it through 40 years of tax contributions. Besides, let's not pretend that people choose to have kids as a service to humanity. I've never, ever heard anyone claim that. People have kids because they're fun, and because making them is fun.
- jdm2212 6y ago
  > Then is it cool if I skip a few meetings to volunteer to help the homeless? That's the thing -- you won't actually go volunteer with the homeless. (Or at least, 99% of us wouldn't.) But parents actually have to change those diapers. If there's a little kid running around in the background of that Zoom call, someone is doing a lot of hard work to keep the kid alive. And unlike volunteering at the homeless shelter, they can't just decide they don't feel like it.
  - nicbou 6y ago
    > you won't actually go volunteer with the homeless This was in response to the parent post: > an essential service that some people perform to ensure that society as we know it can continue to exist If this was the reason why parents get a free pass, people who provide essential services would also get to do it on their employer's dime, at the expense of their colleagues. My point across this entire comments section is that this privilege is arbitrary. A lot of people do hard work for all sorts of important reasons, but when they miss work, it gets mentioned in their performance review.
    - jdm2212 6y ago
      Systemic problems require systemic solutions. One-off problems require one-off solutions. Parenting in the pandemic is a systemic problem. And even in non-pandemic times, we have public schools, child services, parental leave, etc. The national guard and jury duty are likewise systemic problems; we need lots of guardsmen and lots of jurors. Homelessness is a systemic problem, but the particular way you choose to do community service (or not do it) is for you to sort out mostly on your own.
frequentnapper 6y ago
>an essential service that some people perform to ensure that society as we know it can continue to exist I empathize with parents, but please don't make it sound like it's a selfless act they are doing for the good of society. Also, childless couples/singles get taxed at quite a high rate (after any returns) vs parents. You compound that over 21 or whatever years it takes for kids to become "productive". Furthermore, people who choose to stay childless still have to work and pay higher taxes till the age of at least 66 in US. Life expectancy for males is 78, so that gives you 12 years. Social security is in no way enough, and you must survive on pension that you paid into for your retirement. So the child that I helped raised with my extra taxes and without any preferential treatment at work will never even come close to paying me back.
- dataminded 6y ago
  I assume that at age 66 you still want access to things like medical care, fire departments, etc. What value do you place on that? Your taxes enable young people to exist/grow-up and extend those services to you. Providing for kids is selfish, not selfless. Until the singularity happens, we need young children to grow into functioning adults that continue and (hopefully) advance society.
  - frequentnapper 6y ago
    I'm sorry if I implied that I don't want to pay. I'm just emphasizing that the people who choose to have kids are not doing it for selfless reasons.
- gones00n 6y ago
  Well said. It's a bit farcical that this discussion has degenerated into "I have kids for the better of society". Let's stick to the simpler rationale that some people have kids because they love kids and/or want to pass down their genes.
  - jdm2212 6y ago
    People join the military for lots of reasons (patriotism, free college, bad family situation, and more) but we all recognize that funding the military and making life tolerable for service members is necessary for our society to keep working. Similarly, people choose to have kids for lots of reasons (family pressure, want to pass on genes, etc.) but society's continued existence depends on people having kids, so it's on all of us to support the people who do have kids whether or not any given individual's motivation is noble.
baddox 6y ago
That makes it sound like raising children isn't already an extremely strong biological urge and something that tends to provide immense satisfaction to parents. If parents didn't receive special benefits at work to help them raise children, or if all adults were given comparable benefits regardless of whether they have children, I don't think that would shatter the incentive structure and result in having too few humans the next generation. It's really not like military service or jury duty: things which in most cases people do not have an extremely strong biological urge to do.
- 0xB31B1B 6y ago
  uhhh, we already have a shattered incentive structure and are not reproducing enough humans to support the next generation. US fertility is below replacement, as is pretty much every other developed or middle income country. Its likely that we will see peak world population in our lifetime.
  - baddox 6y ago
    Luckily the US population can grow other ways too! And the global population is increasing. And “seeing peak world population in our lifetime” doesn’t sound too scary. Shortage of humans due to humans choosing not to reproduce because they don’t want their non-parent coworkers to be frustrated is one of the smallest existential threats I can imagine.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  > I don't think that would shatter the incentive structure The best available evidence is that fertility rates are highly sensitive to external incentives. For example Russia managed to raise its fertility rate from the lowest in Europe to one of the highest in just a decade. They did that through a combination of cash incentives, extended maternity leave, and various social status and privileges for mothers.
  - AstralStorm 6y ago
    Yes, but it's it good that they did so? Don't they have enough problems with the populace at large of current size? Such as lack of jobs - having more children than replacement exacerbates it. The only way it is beneficial is because some jokers decided that running country on ever increasing debt (esp. retirement) is acceptable, and another decided that growth rates have to be high.
renewiltord 6y ago
> Someone has to provide the goods and services you'll consume when you're old. Those people are today's kids... Or immigrant labour. I'm not a parent-hater or a child-hater (One Billion Americans Go Go Go!) but you can import a lot of people. Heck I'd boost the economy by sustained long term importation of labour to bolster birth so that we can target long term of a billion Americans.
- RankingMember 6y ago
  But why? Do we not look down the road and see that this is basically like an endless arms race, with the environment and the long-term survivability of the planet itself hanging in the balance? Are people happier when they live in a country of 300 million versus a country of 150 million? I completely don't understand the interest some people seem to have in increasing population "just because bigger number".
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    You need to add people to avoid demographic inversion. The Earth can easily sustain way more people. And besides, we want all those people to be here. We'll bring in the best and create a hotbed of blinding innovation - teching up into renewables and new energy sources. Maybe one among the 700 million will be the next Elon Musk and we'll be rocketing towards a cleaner Earth. We owe the coming generations one last push to glory.
    - RankingMember 6y ago
      Do you realize the extent of humankind jingoism you're espousing here? There are other inhabitants of this planet, and I, for one, think they deserve equal footing, which they certainly do not have now. To put it more succinctly: Just because we can doesn't mean we should. Blindly plowing through our natural resources and dashing headlong towards ecological catastrophe all while wishing upon a star that maybe one of these millions of people we're pumping out will save us all is an astoundingly reckless, thoughtless way to proceed. > We owe the coming generations one last push to glory. This is not a Marvel movie. If our oceans turn acidic, if our glaciers melt, it's going to take a lot more than a magical South African to turn back time.
jelliclesfarm 6y ago
People should procreate if they want to and not as a service to society. It’s ok. I think we will manage at 8 billion. You have people who essentially outsourced parenting to have a career and that’s not a ‘sacrifice’. It’s a choice.
- martindbp 6y ago
  It's not that simple. Will we manage at 8 billion but with double the amount of retirees to take care of?
  - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
    We will likely see a decrease in population..we should be ok with 1-3 billion. In 1600, world population was 500 million. 3.5 billion in 1975. Fears of human extinction is unfounded. However an uninhabitable planet due to exponential consumption is a real risk for future populations. Better to be a healthy billion than a starving dying 15 billion strong species.
    - martindbp 6y ago
      The problem is that we're already decreasing our population too fast in many developed countries. We can't go down as rapidly as we went up, or society will collapse.
      - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
        Immigration should solve it. Increasing replacement rate of developed countries doesn’t mean that exponential population in developing countries will decline. Which begs the questions: is the race to fulfill replacement rate in developed countries the real reason to incentivise child births?
        AstralStorm 6y ago
        It isn't, as the rates are near replacement, which should not be a problem. (And increased health span allows some older people to remain in workforce.) However, retirement and social systems were designed during a boom and were inadequately funded.
will4274 6y ago
> today's kids We have too many of them. It's not polite to say, but ultimately many of the problems faced by the human race (like global warming) are a result of over-population. We don't want the replacement rate to drop too low, because it fucks up cross generational dynamics (e.g. social security), but we really would be better off if we had like 5% less kids over the next 20 years.
collyw 6y ago
> It's more like military service and jury duty -- an essential service that some people perform to ensure that society as we know it can continue to exist. I like that analogy a lot and it has me switching my opinion to an extent. While having children is a huge responsibility, many parents don't actually treat it as so. (I would like to think the vast majority do). Is there a way we (socitey) can reward for responsible parenting? Can we decide as a collective what makes "good parenting".
gandutraveler 6y ago
How many parents think about having kids because its an essential service ensure continuance of society? I would say none? It's a personal and selfish choice for their own family. I'm not saying that it doesn't benefit the society. But there are govt schemes like child tax credits etc. which are meant to control the population. Yes parents should be given the time off. But do all parents need the time off? What if you have teenage kids? Also why limit this for parents only, why can't the same benefit apply to singles who can use the extra time off to find their potential partner and hence help in societies growth. I feel it's tone deaf to just talk about parents problems during these crisis.
- kelnos 6y ago
  > Also why limit this for parents only, why can't the same benefit apply to singles who can use the extra time off to find their potential partner and hence help in societies growth. You're mistaking an acute problem for a chronic one. Society won't be harmed if you have to put your dating life on hold for 6 months because of a pandemic. But putting child care on hold for 6 months will result in a lot of dead, injured, or developmentally messed-up kids. > I feel it's tone deaf to just talk about parents problems during these crisis. I don't think that's the case at all. As an example, my employer also talks about general mental health during this pandemic, and encourages everyone -- parents and non-parents alike -- to take the time they need to care for themselves. But as a non-parent I recognize that I haven't been affected much by the pandemic. Yes, I miss seeing my friends, and doing normal things out of my home, but I'm dealing with it reasonably well. If I had kids, what I'd be dealing with would be orders of magnitude more difficult. So I expect and accept that orders of magnitude more time will be spent talking about the problems parents are having right now.
- Zenbit_UX 6y ago
  Not only does it not benefit society but if I flew only on private jets for the rest of my life my carbon impact would still be less than a parent's. Producing a first world clone is the single worst thing you can do to the planet.
Chris2048 6y ago
I'd sooner all children be created in a test tube, raised in government facilities, staffed by payed "parents" that are vetted as strictly as adopters are. That won't happen: Parents will insist on raising their kids (with their DNA), their way, without any strict oversight, or societal interference. The "essential service" is as much about the desires of the parent, than the desires of society. And as for "society as we know it" - what if I don't care for society as we know it?

nickff 6y ago

Except that the children disproportionately benefit the parents (unlike jury duty or military service). This is a heads-parents-win, tails-childless-lose scenario. Your comment would be completely correct if the children ceased all communications and transactions with the parent upon entry into the labor force; but that's not what happens.

polishdude20 6y ago
Well in proportion to the time the parents spend with the kids vs the time you are inconvenienced by them spending time with their kids balances out. Of course they will have a huge benefit from raising their kids. They raised them. But you will also have a benefit from the small temporary hassle it gives you during these times.
- nickff 6y ago
  I am not saying that parents do not deserve attention from their children, I am only making the point that the proposed benefits are disproportionately beneficial to parents.
  - polishdude20 6y ago
    I'm saying they are proportionally beneficial to the parents if the portion of time they spend with their kids is drastically higher than the portion of time you are inconvenienced by that act.
    - nickff 6y ago
      You are asserting that I have some duty to do favors for parents? Should I do their dry cleaning, and get them a coffee if it's 'more convenient' as well?
newen 6y ago
Well, your social security money will be coming directly from those kids working. Just one example of non-parents benefiting. In fact, your entire existence as an old person will be completely dependent on those kids working.
- nickff 6y ago
  The comment I replied to said that parenthood was like military service or jury duty, whose residual benefits accrue equally to the entire populace, and I was simply pointing out that parenthood was different. Non-parents get many benefits from children, but the parents get far more. To be clear, I think many of the arguments for subsidizing the rearing of children are coherent, such as arguments in favor of public schooling and healthcare (on the basis that the children are the primary beneficiaries), but I think those arguments do not apply to the parents' workplace.
  - Tagbert 6y ago
    Yes, parent accrue more benefits from their children than do non-parents, but their investment is significantly higher than the minor difference in time off that you may see. Regardless of any direct benefit to me, I am willing to accept parents getting some small benefits that I will not as a childless person as an overall investment in society as a whole.
    - nickff 6y ago
      I don't think anyone here wants to prevent you from helping parents; the question is whether the case for 'societal investment' is clear and convincing enough to justify forcing everyone else to share the burden.

nicbou 6y ago

Then is it cool if I skip a few meetings to volunteer to help the homeless? We already heavily subsidise child-rearing through taxes and other benefits. As I said elsewhere, there are mechanisms for supporting parents already. If you tried to let any other charitable endeavour take over your work schedule, you wouldn't expect your compensation to remain unaffected. I'm not resentful at parents. It just seems completely unfair to make childless employees subsidise this adventure, as if they didn't already do it through 40 years of tax contributions. Besides, let's not pretend that people choose to have kids as a service to humanity. I've never, ever heard anyone claim that. People have kids because they're fun, and because making them is fun.

jdm2212 6y ago
> Then is it cool if I skip a few meetings to volunteer to help the homeless? That's the thing -- you won't actually go volunteer with the homeless. (Or at least, 99% of us wouldn't.) But parents actually have to change those diapers. If there's a little kid running around in the background of that Zoom call, someone is doing a lot of hard work to keep the kid alive. And unlike volunteering at the homeless shelter, they can't just decide they don't feel like it.
- nicbou 6y ago
  > you won't actually go volunteer with the homeless This was in response to the parent post: > an essential service that some people perform to ensure that society as we know it can continue to exist If this was the reason why parents get a free pass, people who provide essential services would also get to do it on their employer's dime, at the expense of their colleagues. My point across this entire comments section is that this privilege is arbitrary. A lot of people do hard work for all sorts of important reasons, but when they miss work, it gets mentioned in their performance review.
  - jdm2212 6y ago
    Systemic problems require systemic solutions. One-off problems require one-off solutions. Parenting in the pandemic is a systemic problem. And even in non-pandemic times, we have public schools, child services, parental leave, etc. The national guard and jury duty are likewise systemic problems; we need lots of guardsmen and lots of jurors. Homelessness is a systemic problem, but the particular way you choose to do community service (or not do it) is for you to sort out mostly on your own.

frequentnapper 6y ago

>an essential service that some people perform to ensure that society as we know it can continue to exist I empathize with parents, but please don't make it sound like it's a selfless act they are doing for the good of society. Also, childless couples/singles get taxed at quite a high rate (after any returns) vs parents. You compound that over 21 or whatever years it takes for kids to become "productive". Furthermore, people who choose to stay childless still have to work and pay higher taxes till the age of at least 66 in US. Life expectancy for males is 78, so that gives you 12 years. Social security is in no way enough, and you must survive on pension that you paid into for your retirement. So the child that I helped raised with my extra taxes and without any preferential treatment at work will never even come close to paying me back.

dataminded 6y ago
I assume that at age 66 you still want access to things like medical care, fire departments, etc. What value do you place on that? Your taxes enable young people to exist/grow-up and extend those services to you. Providing for kids is selfish, not selfless. Until the singularity happens, we need young children to grow into functioning adults that continue and (hopefully) advance society.
- frequentnapper 6y ago
  I'm sorry if I implied that I don't want to pay. I'm just emphasizing that the people who choose to have kids are not doing it for selfless reasons.
gones00n 6y ago
Well said. It's a bit farcical that this discussion has degenerated into "I have kids for the better of society". Let's stick to the simpler rationale that some people have kids because they love kids and/or want to pass down their genes.
- jdm2212 6y ago
  People join the military for lots of reasons (patriotism, free college, bad family situation, and more) but we all recognize that funding the military and making life tolerable for service members is necessary for our society to keep working. Similarly, people choose to have kids for lots of reasons (family pressure, want to pass on genes, etc.) but society's continued existence depends on people having kids, so it's on all of us to support the people who do have kids whether or not any given individual's motivation is noble.

baddox 6y ago

That makes it sound like raising children isn't already an extremely strong biological urge and something that tends to provide immense satisfaction to parents. If parents didn't receive special benefits at work to help them raise children, or if all adults were given comparable benefits regardless of whether they have children, I don't think that would shatter the incentive structure and result in having too few humans the next generation. It's really not like military service or jury duty: things which in most cases people do not have an extremely strong biological urge to do.

0xB31B1B 6y ago
uhhh, we already have a shattered incentive structure and are not reproducing enough humans to support the next generation. US fertility is below replacement, as is pretty much every other developed or middle income country. Its likely that we will see peak world population in our lifetime.
- baddox 6y ago
  Luckily the US population can grow other ways too! And the global population is increasing. And “seeing peak world population in our lifetime” doesn’t sound too scary. Shortage of humans due to humans choosing not to reproduce because they don’t want their non-parent coworkers to be frustrated is one of the smallest existential threats I can imagine.
dcolkitt 6y ago
> I don't think that would shatter the incentive structure The best available evidence is that fertility rates are highly sensitive to external incentives. For example Russia managed to raise its fertility rate from the lowest in Europe to one of the highest in just a decade. They did that through a combination of cash incentives, extended maternity leave, and various social status and privileges for mothers.
- AstralStorm 6y ago
  Yes, but it's it good that they did so? Don't they have enough problems with the populace at large of current size? Such as lack of jobs - having more children than replacement exacerbates it. The only way it is beneficial is because some jokers decided that running country on ever increasing debt (esp. retirement) is acceptable, and another decided that growth rates have to be high.

renewiltord 6y ago

> Someone has to provide the goods and services you'll consume when you're old. Those people are today's kids... Or immigrant labour. I'm not a parent-hater or a child-hater (One Billion Americans Go Go Go!) but you can import a lot of people. Heck I'd boost the economy by sustained long term importation of labour to bolster birth so that we can target long term of a billion Americans.

RankingMember 6y ago
But why? Do we not look down the road and see that this is basically like an endless arms race, with the environment and the long-term survivability of the planet itself hanging in the balance? Are people happier when they live in a country of 300 million versus a country of 150 million? I completely don't understand the interest some people seem to have in increasing population "just because bigger number".
- renewiltord 6y ago
  You need to add people to avoid demographic inversion. The Earth can easily sustain way more people. And besides, we want all those people to be here. We'll bring in the best and create a hotbed of blinding innovation - teching up into renewables and new energy sources. Maybe one among the 700 million will be the next Elon Musk and we'll be rocketing towards a cleaner Earth. We owe the coming generations one last push to glory.
  - RankingMember 6y ago
    Do you realize the extent of humankind jingoism you're espousing here? There are other inhabitants of this planet, and I, for one, think they deserve equal footing, which they certainly do not have now. To put it more succinctly: Just because we can doesn't mean we should. Blindly plowing through our natural resources and dashing headlong towards ecological catastrophe all while wishing upon a star that maybe one of these millions of people we're pumping out will save us all is an astoundingly reckless, thoughtless way to proceed. > We owe the coming generations one last push to glory. This is not a Marvel movie. If our oceans turn acidic, if our glaciers melt, it's going to take a lot more than a magical South African to turn back time.

jelliclesfarm 6y ago

People should procreate if they want to and not as a service to society. It’s ok. I think we will manage at 8 billion. You have people who essentially outsourced parenting to have a career and that’s not a ‘sacrifice’. It’s a choice.

martindbp 6y ago
It's not that simple. Will we manage at 8 billion but with double the amount of retirees to take care of?
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  We will likely see a decrease in population..we should be ok with 1-3 billion. In 1600, world population was 500 million. 3.5 billion in 1975. Fears of human extinction is unfounded. However an uninhabitable planet due to exponential consumption is a real risk for future populations. Better to be a healthy billion than a starving dying 15 billion strong species.
  - martindbp 6y ago
    The problem is that we're already decreasing our population too fast in many developed countries. We can't go down as rapidly as we went up, or society will collapse.
    - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
      Immigration should solve it. Increasing replacement rate of developed countries doesn’t mean that exponential population in developing countries will decline. Which begs the questions: is the race to fulfill replacement rate in developed countries the real reason to incentivise child births?
      - AstralStorm 6y ago
        It isn't, as the rates are near replacement, which should not be a problem. (And increased health span allows some older people to remain in workforce.) However, retirement and social systems were designed during a boom and were inadequately funded.

will4274 6y ago

> today's kids We have too many of them. It's not polite to say, but ultimately many of the problems faced by the human race (like global warming) are a result of over-population. We don't want the replacement rate to drop too low, because it fucks up cross generational dynamics (e.g. social security), but we really would be better off if we had like 5% less kids over the next 20 years.

collyw 6y ago

> It's more like military service and jury duty -- an essential service that some people perform to ensure that society as we know it can continue to exist. I like that analogy a lot and it has me switching my opinion to an extent. While having children is a huge responsibility, many parents don't actually treat it as so. (I would like to think the vast majority do). Is there a way we (socitey) can reward for responsible parenting? Can we decide as a collective what makes "good parenting".

gandutraveler 6y ago

How many parents think about having kids because its an essential service ensure continuance of society? I would say none? It's a personal and selfish choice for their own family. I'm not saying that it doesn't benefit the society. But there are govt schemes like child tax credits etc. which are meant to control the population. Yes parents should be given the time off. But do all parents need the time off? What if you have teenage kids? Also why limit this for parents only, why can't the same benefit apply to singles who can use the extra time off to find their potential partner and hence help in societies growth. I feel it's tone deaf to just talk about parents problems during these crisis.

kelnos 6y ago
> Also why limit this for parents only, why can't the same benefit apply to singles who can use the extra time off to find their potential partner and hence help in societies growth. You're mistaking an acute problem for a chronic one. Society won't be harmed if you have to put your dating life on hold for 6 months because of a pandemic. But putting child care on hold for 6 months will result in a lot of dead, injured, or developmentally messed-up kids. > I feel it's tone deaf to just talk about parents problems during these crisis. I don't think that's the case at all. As an example, my employer also talks about general mental health during this pandemic, and encourages everyone -- parents and non-parents alike -- to take the time they need to care for themselves. But as a non-parent I recognize that I haven't been affected much by the pandemic. Yes, I miss seeing my friends, and doing normal things out of my home, but I'm dealing with it reasonably well. If I had kids, what I'd be dealing with would be orders of magnitude more difficult. So I expect and accept that orders of magnitude more time will be spent talking about the problems parents are having right now.
Zenbit_UX 6y ago
Not only does it not benefit society but if I flew only on private jets for the rest of my life my carbon impact would still be less than a parent's. Producing a first world clone is the single worst thing you can do to the planet.

Chris2048 6y ago

I'd sooner all children be created in a test tube, raised in government facilities, staffed by payed "parents" that are vetted as strictly as adopters are. That won't happen: Parents will insist on raising their kids (with their DNA), their way, without any strict oversight, or societal interference. The "essential service" is as much about the desires of the parent, than the desires of society. And as for "society as we know it" - what if I don't care for society as we know it?