The value judgement is saying the changes you want are worth doing because they might reduce it. Social and personal choices are weighed all the time that include risks to lives, suggesting something that might reduce risk does not end the debate.
We would generally want to prevent people dying in horrible aviation disasters too, we could do that by ceasing non essential air travel.
If the value that the “other side” is espousing is that “it’s okay for girls to die giving birth”, well, we can safely discount that as a valid position to hold in modern society.
I believe nothing is *absolutely bad* in modern society.
For example, the best way to stop pregnancy-related deaths is to forcely termination any high-risk pregnancy regardless of the pregnant woman's own wishes. But seems no one would agree.
Or maybe it’s a problem of spending all your effort working a job for 40+ years, and having your curiosity atrophy into nothingness.
I retired last year in my late 30’s and it’s just such a life upgrade. I study Mandarin, go to the gym, cook fun meals, volunteer at our community garden, volunteer at our food pantry, go to board game nights, brew beer, DIY house maintenance, write some software for myself for fun, etc. I have so much more time to spend learning new things, it’s ridiculous. I just can’t even fathom continuing to do a job I don’t particularly enjoy just because I’m too unimaginative to figure out what I’d do with the extra 40+ hours of weekly freedom.
My thoughts exactly. Maybe I'm just wired differently, but if I couldn't work anymore or didn't need to I'd be like "Finally! I can spend as much time as I need to make yeast glow with CRISPR, collect microscopic things, build a chicken coop, learn to fly planes, build a bigger coil gun, actually get proficient at speaking German, go to more pub trivia, build a new Dobsonian telescope, yada yada." And I'm bet someone would say "you're not really gonna do all those things." Well, you're wrong. Those are the sorts of things I've done since I was a kid. I would just have so much more time to do them. There is no way I would retire and have nothing to do.
I've been doing sort of a temporary version of that :). I quit working for the next year or maybe some more to focus on a big house renovation project, among other things (a few major car, truck, and tractor projects too.. some welding.. building some other machinery..). I figured why wait until some indefinite future to do work that is actually personally meaningful rather than what an employer tells me to do? I guess financially this year of negative income has some opportunity cost associated with it, but I'm building a bunch of stuff that cannot be bought, and I'd rather take the time now when it's definitely good than wait for a "maybe". And frankly the tech treadmill had pretty well erased the interest I used to have in computing. I'm also quite happy to be sitting out the current AI insanity. I've been working on some personal coding projects as well--as well as playing with local LLMs--to stay current and hopefully rekindle the interest in computing that the industry beat out of me. The work used to be fun, where did that go?
Or maybe that's just the human condition? Retirement is a pretty recent concept anyway. Back when people were hunter/gatherers or subsistence farmers, you didn't have the option of retiring. You either kept working or you starved, perished from the elements, etc.
I mean, that just isn't true. There are amazon tribes today where they just send them down the river to die... your ideas are a disney-fied version of a false past that never existed.
Unspecified Amazon tribes don't represent the lion's share of historical treatment of aging populations. One negative example doesn't undermine the point.
Yes, humanity is full of various societies that do things differently. These ideas aren't disney-fied - they're just accurate representations of the fact that people care for each other, most of the time.
I appreciate your anecdote, but here's a few counter-examples:
> a society that more or less forces people to make work their only focus
Modern American society really doesn't force anyone to do this. Targeting work-life balance requires making trade-offs. But in a country where the median wage is around $45k, some significant fraction of half of Americans can dial down their work if they reduce lifestyle and consumption.
One caution there; if you read the small print, they're using PPP figures. Which is definitely better than using nominal figures, but doesn't account for anything. In particular, it doesn't account for transfers, either direct (social welfare payments) or indirect (subsidised healthcare, housing, childcare etc etc).
Not to say it's a useless figure, but it can mislead (especially for lower income people, where healthcare costs and childcare costs, say, might be literally 0 in some countries, and a huge part of their income in others).
And obviously for people trying to do the FIRE thing in particular, healthcare costs are likely to be a very big deal; for those in countries like the US where most people get healthcare through their job, that's an additional consideration that people in countries where it's done by income-based subsidised insurance, or free-at-point-of-use systems, don't have.
"In particular, it doesn't account for transfers, either direct (social welfare payments) or indirect (subsidised healthcare, housing, childcare etc etc)."
I believe your claim may be incorrect:
"Depending on the country and year, the data refers either to income (after taxes and benefits) or to consumption, per capita."
I think they are trying to place a dollar value on healthcare and childcare provided by the state and incorporate it as "income". I might be misunderstanding. It seems like a very imperfect science, but about as good of an effort as anyone has made.
Do you have anything more interesting to say on the topic than "No U wrong"? The OP had a lot of thoughtful comments about the issues with having things to do after retiring.
VW was established by the nazis and was so excited at the conflict in Gaza they converted a factory into a missile factory recently to help the side that killed more journalists than in any other recorded conflict.
That's a very strange way to say that they sold it to a missile company. I'm pretty sure the new owner is responsible for converting it. Besides which, if they're Nazis then why would they care about protecting Jews?
Your questions would be quickly answered by looking at the relevant style guides. Any university will also have webpage about citations: APA, Chicago, MLA, etc.
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