The article doesn't mention of "Bowling Alone" by Robert Putnam, which explored pretty much the same idea, a.k.a. the value of the 'room', (which for Putnam was 'social capital'), and its rapid decline. Bowling Alone was published in 2000, looking back to 1950, and noted the massive, synchronous decline of civic participation in pretty much everything non-work-related across American society. Every kind of gentle, recurrent, voluntary activity you can imagine was on a pretty steep decline even before the smartphone or widespread adoption of the Internet
As a (young, thus-far childless) woman, I feel it's important to add something that men may not fully grasp and I haven't seen much in the thread so far: what tips the scales in this decision is often not just daycare costs/career prospects, but also the potentially extreme side effects of pregnancy on the body.
Going through the process of being pregnant and giving birth is absolutely terrifying to me and most of my friends. How many tech bros do you know who do their blood labs on a yearly basis, or track their blood sugar daily? How many do sports physio to avoid the possibility of a minor training injury, or do any number of peptide interventions to micro-optimise some aspect of their health or physique?
If having babies, for them, was basically a coin toss re: possibly developing diabetes, ripping open their pelvic floor and becoming incontinent, adding 8 points to your BMI, or major sleeping problems, etc., would they still be as mystified about the low TFR?
(Of course, many men go through physical hell when raising children too, and I don't want to diminish their contribution, but on average their physical symptoms are less extreme)
Sometimes the knee jerk 'just get a caesarean' and lower maternal mortality numbers mask the reality of how barbaric the process seems, at least from my vantage point as someone who might one day be involved in the process. The number of privileged women who choose the surrogate path alone should suggest how many women might opt out of the physical part of it, if they could; if having babies isn't a social obligation or a biological inevitability without birth control, there's quite a strong argument for putting it off just one more year...
This actually isn't true for some types of farmed fish, like Norwegian salmon, but it varies by area and by company.
The industry is looking into alternatives like insects, and typically 30-40% of the feed now comes from vegetable proteins and oils.
On the other hand, farmed Faroese salmon (just next door) has a much higher % of wild-caught fish in its feed, which contributes to the high omega 3 content of Faroese salmon.
>> Through the big role played by the industrial fishing, 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic float in our oceans, enough to circulate the equator 425 times, go to the moon twice and back, with the total amount of plastic heavier than the weight of 38,000 elephants. The debris comes from about 640,000 tonnes of nets, lines, and other fishing materials, all having the same weight as 55,000 double-decker buses.
Double decker buses, elephants, to the moon - all we're missing is the 'football pitch' standard journalistic unit..
On a different note, the author fails to include the world 'wild' fish; sustainable aquaculture practices are going to be a very useful way to meet the world's protein needs.
The protein conversion ratio of farmed salmon is lower than chicken, beef, pork, and most conventionally farmed land animals.
There are different levels of sustainability - shrimp farming in former mangroves is not very good for overall climate.
ASC-certified salmon farming in Norway, where antibiotic use is heavily restricted, is much better. Wild fishing has many evils; fish farms when done properly are not as bad.
Interesting site. I currently work at a hedge fund, but have a small dose of NLP in my academic background, so it's always interesting to see concepts like this come out.
Two questions:
- Are you using EDGAR's 'Facts' function? It seems to make SEC Filings a lot more like structured text than they have been previously, but I haven't seen really convincing tools developed to use it yet
- How/do you ever see yourself interfacing with similar 'red flag' screening tools that just work on the numerical side i.e. accounting ratios ?
Also, you've got a grammatical error on your Values and Vision page.
Normally I wouldn't comment to point that kind of thing out, but for an NLP startup it seems more appropriate ('its volume' not 'it's volume')!