@neoboheme @EurocentricTuga No, it's not the ethnic Bulgarians having kids.
English
Jaaph
4.7K posts
correlation to tfr is probably 0.
Rothmus 🏴@Rothmus
Europe’s baby bust map: West/North: 5-17% see kids as a “duty to society” East/South: 30-83% Fertility everywhere below replacement. No cultural turnaround on families and children will inevitably lead to slow extinction or replacement. Simple math.
English
Man in Italië rijdt in op menigte en steekt persoon neer, meerdere gewonden ift.tt/vXg21Cb
Nederlands
A car has been rammed into a group of people in the Italian city of Modena the attacker has also stabbed people.
English
@SaysSimulation EoY party: boys' opinions on songs ignored since time immemorial.
English
@SaysSimulation Even at a right-wing school (Cath school until recently ran by nuns) I cringe.
Of course, the only men are in useless roles, PhysEd, Music.
Today I almost ripped up my son's religion homework because it was about Mary the Influencer. What?!?!
Told my son to just ignore it.
English
There is a case to be made that the future of humanity is being determined by an intra-sexual competition among women.
We are seeing the highest divergences ever between young men & young women when it comes to politics & children. This comes from the education system.
1/
Labrador Skeptic@SaysSimulation
At least in China, fertility desires among young women in college are collapsing in real time. Gen Z is turning out to be radically different from the Millennials. 75% of college-educated women aged 18-24 report having no desire for children. There are huge differences by sex 1/
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@spkyartbrrr @gowonmode There are levels to bullying like everything in life.
For years I got harassed in the hallway just before class by the same guy plus sidekicks, the rest ignored me, teachers useless. Breaks mostly lonely, even among the freaks.
Outside I was free though.
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@gowonmode I wish my experience was just getting ignored, I had pinecones and small rocks thrown at me, was made fun of and pushed inside and outside school to the point i avoided going outside as much as possible. They also made a fake facebook account with my name nd several fake accounts
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i absolutely hatedddd the term bullying as a kid. my “bullies” never behaved like the bullies on TV. most of the “bullying” i experienced in school was just being ignored or avoided in ways that were imperceptible to anyone that wasnt a kid in our grade
Raven Lyn Clemens@RavenLynClemens
bullying is never as simple as we like to think it is. in popular culture you have your innocent misunderstood victim and the bully who hurts the victim just because they like hurting weak defenceless people. it's not always that simple
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@janesue821 A kid in my son's kindergarten was jumping on the bed with his sister, parents other room.
He hit a pole sticking out wrong and bled out in front of them.
English
I know of two children who died in freak accidents that were so random nothing short of keeping them in locked, padded rooms their entire childhoods would have prevented their deaths. I think about them more than I should and wonder how much matters.
mrs. dobbins ☕️🪶@mrsdobbins_
Every parent has had certain lived experiences that cause them to be hyperactive about a niche danger. Maybe because of something you experienced, your parents/grandparents experienced, or your career taught you. Except now as a parent, you are exposed to the niche danger fears of nearly everyone in the entire world. You will scroll social media and see 80 different ways your child can die or harm themselves or set themselves back. “As a nutritionist, here are 6 foods I would NEVER let my child eat” “as a speech language pathologist, here are 3 signs that your child is behind” “as an ER doctor of 15 years, here are the top 10 things I would never let my child play with” “my nephew drowned, here’s what I learned about outdoor safety” and that’s all in 35 seconds worth of clips. Pretty wild.
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What does it mean to be “rich” in Spain? 🇪🇸 (by income)
- Top 1% ≈ €130,000+
- Top 5% ≈ €70,000+
- Top 10% ≈ €55,000–€60,000+
- Top 25% ≈ €30,000+
- Median (50%) ≈ €19,000–€22,000 gross
- Bottom 50% average: ~€11,000
Everyone throws around words like “wealthy” or “middle class” without realizing how low the bar actually is in Spain
English
@Aamin_Marritza @DouthatNYT Well, tbh the Downtown East Side would look bad in Kinshasa.
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@DouthatNYT I visited Canada (Vancouver) and saw depths of poverty that would be unthinkable in the UK. The US think of Canada as a place with less abject poverty.
So I feel confident that in the US you have some pretty severe issues with poverty.
English
I have done the "driving around" test the authors advocate in both the UK and Italy in the last few years; in each case the countryside was beautiful and also *clearly* poorer than American-heartland suburbia.
x.com/lugaricano/sta…
Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦@lugaricano
We stopped everything to write an answer (link below) to Paul Krugman's two posts of today (one informal, one with a simple model) arguing that Europe is broadly not falling behind the United States. The change measured by the Draghi report, he argues, is mostly due to growth in the technology industry, which has distorted GDP numbers without actually leading to higher standards of living. We should believe our eyes when we walk around France and walk around Mississippi. Krugman is wrong. The measures he uses understate European stagnation. This matters enormously. Divergence with the United States is the strongest evidence for reform in Europe. 1. The growth numbers Krugman compares the United States, France, and Germany at purchasing power parity in current prices. On that measure, France's and Germany's position relative to America has been roughly constant since 2000. But current price comparisons miss productivity gains in sectors where prices fall. If America produces twice as much software while the price of each unit halves, the value of American software output looks unchanged even though the volume has doubled. Most economists therefore use constant prices, which fix the base-year PPP level and apply each country's real output growth on top of it. American output growth has concentrated in tech, where prices have fallen tremendously as productivity rises. In terms of the volume of things produced, America has pulled away from Europe. 2. Is it all the tech industry? Krugman concedes this tech divergence but says it is not welfare-relevant. The American growth lead is an accounting artefact of measuring more iPhones at base-year prices, not a sign that Americans are actually richer, because Europeans buy the same iPhones at the same world prices. This is not the right way to think about the world today, as an earlier Paul Krugman would have argued. His model assumes tradable goods, interchangeable workers, marginal-cost pricing, and no profits. Each assumption fails. Most of what households buy is non-tradable: housing, healthcare, childcare, education. When American tech firms bid workers from haircutting to coding, American haircut wages rise. Germany has no growing tech sector to do the bidding, so German wages stay flat. Technology is not priced at marginal cost. Apple's margins are around 40 percent. Anthropic's inference margins are at 70 percent. The major platforms enjoy network effects, switching costs, and lock-in that hold prices well above what a competitive market would deliver. A large share of the productivity gains in technology stays as profit. A lot of the value of American technology dominance shows up in equity, not in wages. Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon together are worth $21 trillion, more than the entire combined stock market value of all European stock markets. Around 60 percent of US equity is held by American households. The median French or Spanish household holds almost no equity. The median employee at Meta, a company with almost 80,000 employees, earned $388,000 in 2025. This advantage is not going to go away. Krugman's own 1991 paper, cited in his Nobel prize, showed that comparative advantage in modern industries is produced by increasing returns to scale, specialized labor markets, supplier networks and the agglomeration of suppliers, workers, and ideas in particular places. Once an industry concentrates somewhere, the concentration is self-reinforcing. Europe is being pushed away from the next round of technology industries (AI!). 3. What about inequality? Another retort is that GDP per capita hides substantial inequality, and so even if America is rich on average, this is mostly due to the super wealthy. But despite the US's high pre-tax income inequality, it also achieves higher median incomes than Europe, in part because of such a high base, and in part because it actually redistributes more than many European countries. The cleanest comparison is median equivalised disposable household income: income after cash taxes and transfers, adjusted for household size and purchasing power. According to the OECD's 2021 numbers, the median American earns 30 percent more than the median Dutchman, about 31 percent more than the median German, and about 52 percent more than the median Frenchman. 4. What about hours worked? Krugman points out that while American GDP per person is higher, most of this is because Americans work more. For this divergence to be an hours worked story, Americans must work more relative to Europeans now than they did in 2000. The opposite has happened. Birinci, Karabarbounis, and See in a 2026 NBER paper show that about half of the American-European hours gap that existed in the 1990s has reversed by the end of the 2010s. Americans work fewer hours per person than they did in 2000, while most Europeans work more. 5. Is America not a bad place to live? Walk around Alabama and France: surely the former cannot be substantially richer than the latter? American cities often have poorer centres and richer suburbs or exurbs. European cities preserve richer and more attractive historic cores. A visit to a city as a tourist in America compared with a city in France will leave one having seen different spots on the income distribution. Americans in Europe go to the nicest and richest European cities. Rather than a walking around test, do a driving around test. Go to the periphery of any modern American city and see a level of new-built material wealth that is extremely uncommon in Europe, with thousands of enormous four- or five-bedroom homes. In the South, in places like Nashville and Austin, drive around the downtowns to see hundreds of luxury apartment buildings springing from the ground. This construction boom is replicated virtually nowhere in Europe today. The other question is generational. Housing often costs more in Europe than in the United States, despite the quality of the housing stock generally being much better. Europe has nice city cores but these are inaccessible to young Europeans. Consider the salaries available to entry-level workers. The starting pay for a London police officer is $57,000. In Washington, DC, $75,000. The entry-level Deloitte consultant job in Madrid pays around €28,000, roughly $33,000 per year. In Charlotte, the entry-level Deloitte job pays $63,000. There are many things to dislike about life in America. But relative to 25 years ago, the gap in material wealth has shifted dramatically in America's favor. siliconcontinent.com/p/european-sta…
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@zonwu @GroovySciFi Because in their cultures it's not really a crime to kill your wife depending on the reasons.
Killing your wife over burnt toast raises eyebrows there, but anything else is fair game.
English
@GroovySciFi 25% of femminicidio are perpetrated by non-Italians (about 9% of the total population).
Usually, in those cases, they're not using the term "femminicidio". Guess why.
English
Italy lore fact: Italian news gives regular updates on an epidemic of violence and murder against women, called femicidio and often compared to genocide in its scale.
Here is an unrelated map of homicide against women in Europe.
English
@Afinetheorem @lugaricano How long do those chopstick houses with shingle roofs last versus brick/stone & tiles?
English
@lugaricano The city versus suburbs difference is the most notable. Even random N American cities no one in Europe has ever heard of, with declining downtowns, have effectively mile after mile of large houses accessible to pretty normal people who didn't inherit them.
English
Europe looks great to Americans because Europe is great for people with American incomes to buy the nicest it has to offer. But the nicest it has to offer is not available to (young) people in Europe today.
Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦@lugaricano
We stopped everything to write an answer (link below) to Paul Krugman's two posts of today (one informal, one with a simple model) arguing that Europe is broadly not falling behind the United States. The change measured by the Draghi report, he argues, is mostly due to growth in the technology industry, which has distorted GDP numbers without actually leading to higher standards of living. We should believe our eyes when we walk around France and walk around Mississippi. Krugman is wrong. The measures he uses understate European stagnation. This matters enormously. Divergence with the United States is the strongest evidence for reform in Europe. 1. The growth numbers Krugman compares the United States, France, and Germany at purchasing power parity in current prices. On that measure, France's and Germany's position relative to America has been roughly constant since 2000. But current price comparisons miss productivity gains in sectors where prices fall. If America produces twice as much software while the price of each unit halves, the value of American software output looks unchanged even though the volume has doubled. Most economists therefore use constant prices, which fix the base-year PPP level and apply each country's real output growth on top of it. American output growth has concentrated in tech, where prices have fallen tremendously as productivity rises. In terms of the volume of things produced, America has pulled away from Europe. 2. Is it all the tech industry? Krugman concedes this tech divergence but says it is not welfare-relevant. The American growth lead is an accounting artefact of measuring more iPhones at base-year prices, not a sign that Americans are actually richer, because Europeans buy the same iPhones at the same world prices. This is not the right way to think about the world today, as an earlier Paul Krugman would have argued. His model assumes tradable goods, interchangeable workers, marginal-cost pricing, and no profits. Each assumption fails. Most of what households buy is non-tradable: housing, healthcare, childcare, education. When American tech firms bid workers from haircutting to coding, American haircut wages rise. Germany has no growing tech sector to do the bidding, so German wages stay flat. Technology is not priced at marginal cost. Apple's margins are around 40 percent. Anthropic's inference margins are at 70 percent. The major platforms enjoy network effects, switching costs, and lock-in that hold prices well above what a competitive market would deliver. A large share of the productivity gains in technology stays as profit. A lot of the value of American technology dominance shows up in equity, not in wages. Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon together are worth $21 trillion, more than the entire combined stock market value of all European stock markets. Around 60 percent of US equity is held by American households. The median French or Spanish household holds almost no equity. The median employee at Meta, a company with almost 80,000 employees, earned $388,000 in 2025. This advantage is not going to go away. Krugman's own 1991 paper, cited in his Nobel prize, showed that comparative advantage in modern industries is produced by increasing returns to scale, specialized labor markets, supplier networks and the agglomeration of suppliers, workers, and ideas in particular places. Once an industry concentrates somewhere, the concentration is self-reinforcing. Europe is being pushed away from the next round of technology industries (AI!). 3. What about inequality? Another retort is that GDP per capita hides substantial inequality, and so even if America is rich on average, this is mostly due to the super wealthy. But despite the US's high pre-tax income inequality, it also achieves higher median incomes than Europe, in part because of such a high base, and in part because it actually redistributes more than many European countries. The cleanest comparison is median equivalised disposable household income: income after cash taxes and transfers, adjusted for household size and purchasing power. According to the OECD's 2021 numbers, the median American earns 30 percent more than the median Dutchman, about 31 percent more than the median German, and about 52 percent more than the median Frenchman. 4. What about hours worked? Krugman points out that while American GDP per person is higher, most of this is because Americans work more. For this divergence to be an hours worked story, Americans must work more relative to Europeans now than they did in 2000. The opposite has happened. Birinci, Karabarbounis, and See in a 2026 NBER paper show that about half of the American-European hours gap that existed in the 1990s has reversed by the end of the 2010s. Americans work fewer hours per person than they did in 2000, while most Europeans work more. 5. Is America not a bad place to live? Walk around Alabama and France: surely the former cannot be substantially richer than the latter? American cities often have poorer centres and richer suburbs or exurbs. European cities preserve richer and more attractive historic cores. A visit to a city as a tourist in America compared with a city in France will leave one having seen different spots on the income distribution. Americans in Europe go to the nicest and richest European cities. Rather than a walking around test, do a driving around test. Go to the periphery of any modern American city and see a level of new-built material wealth that is extremely uncommon in Europe, with thousands of enormous four- or five-bedroom homes. In the South, in places like Nashville and Austin, drive around the downtowns to see hundreds of luxury apartment buildings springing from the ground. This construction boom is replicated virtually nowhere in Europe today. The other question is generational. Housing often costs more in Europe than in the United States, despite the quality of the housing stock generally being much better. Europe has nice city cores but these are inaccessible to young Europeans. Consider the salaries available to entry-level workers. The starting pay for a London police officer is $57,000. In Washington, DC, $75,000. The entry-level Deloitte consultant job in Madrid pays around €28,000, roughly $33,000 per year. In Charlotte, the entry-level Deloitte job pays $63,000. There are many things to dislike about life in America. But relative to 25 years ago, the gap in material wealth has shifted dramatically in America's favor. siliconcontinent.com/p/european-sta…
English
@Superasturianu Llevo años pensando que, cuando yo me jubile (actualmente tengo 36 años) la pensión como la conocemos hoy en día no existirá. Será una especie de Ingreso Mínimo Vital para todos igual, tanto si has sido Directivo de Repsol como si has fregado portales
Español
Ya expliqué hace unas semanas lo que va a pasar. Lo mismo que ha pasado con la prestación por desempleo en estos últimos 20 años. Lo sufrí en mis propias carnes. Los límites inferior y superior convergiendo hacia una renta (casi) única de subsistencia. Con suerte.
olga rusu 🌻🚜@olgarusu
Lo peor es que tendremos un problema gravísimo con las pensiones tanto si creéis en ello como si no
Español
Hay un periodista vasco ex redactor del Egin y el Gara muy activo en Twitter que me divierte un poco porque sólo por lo mucho que habla de ello se le nota que en su fuero interno está pidiendo la Total Moro Death, aunque tenga que hacerlo de un modo *extremadamente* diplomatico.
Ciriaco™@Ciriaco_SPQR
El tema de la inmigración, especialmente desde el acelerón que está pegando en los últimos años, tiene a gente que se veía a sí misma como la antítesis de la xenofobia hasta las narices. Gente que dice "yo no quiero parecer tal o cual, pero..."
Español
@Zachary94825043 @DrunkTweeterr @theonlytruecel Same with Roma and Slavic in Europe.
Basically it is the reaction to a bad wheat based unlimited resources diet and no exercise that hasn't been bred out (yet).
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@DrunkTweeterr @theonlytruecel This was my first thought as well. The common Amerindian female build of a square box on top of stick figure legs
English
what is the female equivalent of being short as a male? if you say being fat or skinny im going to put you in solitary confinement for the rest of your life because not weighing enough or weighing too much can be fixed fairly simply, never said easily just simply.
Doug@GirlsDislikeMe
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@JacksonWharf @John_Hempton @AvidCommentator Sounds like you're just going in for an oil change.
Any idea of the pricetag?
English
@John_Hempton @AvidCommentator Ship of Theseus though, replace the engine and parts, and it flies another 10 years
English
An entire Airbus A320 for less than the median Australian capital city house...
English
This is only the 2nd inning, folks.
Using the 2008 analogy, right now is the March weekend when Bear Sterns collapsed, and the Fed had to step in to intervene.
But primary dealers are okay. GSIBs are okay. There will be NO monday-premarket 75bps emergency rate cut this time.
English
@MichaelAArouet Well, what did David Reich say about the Y and X chromosomes in Latin America?
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Aren’t we told that we need immigration to fix the birth rate problem in Europe?
Well, men don’t get pregnant that often. How exactly does this fix the births issue?
BTW, the spike just below 18 years is statistically not explainable.
English
What’s a path you didn’t take in early life whose destination you often wonder about?
In my early 20s, instead of going to China, I strongly considered going to Francophone Africa, completely without a plan.
It would be interesting to see how that would have turned out.
English
@ndnd778 @chribreuer Noah, James, Mateo, Elijah and Lucas?
Three apostles, a prophet and a patriarch.
English
It's interesting that almost all female names are also common in Germany (and considered "native"), while almost all boy names are rated as English/foreign here.
Pop Crave@PopCrave
Most popular baby names in the United States, according to new data released by the Social Security Administration.
English