I think the strategy of grinding and rising young works well (as it does in life) that way you have the "padding" to handle a layoff or a period of touching grass.
Also (so far) layoffs + severance have been good. They work well in the game too - take the severance, touch grass and leet code, get a new job
There was a thread yesterday about how "the left" is driving the fertility rate collapse - so I am not sure the case for "reality leaning left" is so clear cut.
I feel like any statement with "surely all they have to do" is going to miss some nuance.
In this particular case the apartment is owned by the coop (that's how coops work) and the mortgage is for the shares in the coop. So maybe more complex than a basic foreclosure where it might possibly work more like you'd think.
I think the broader point is if real estate is selling well below what is you would expect, there's a reason for that.
A few years ago an apartment in my building was up for a foreclosure sale. Price looked good but turned out it was literally impossible to figure out (1) how much or the original dead beat's mortgage i would be on the hook for (2) tax burden and (3) unpaid coop fees i would owe.
So even as finance save person already in the building, it was impossible to figure out what I'd be getting/owing. Really ruined my taste for these things.
Fair point. What I'm talking about specifically is being intentional with the values and orientation we raise our kids, versus leaving it to chance which I think was the default earlier.
Some families avoided being hippies just like they avoided being free facto castrated as per this article. People are much more intentional now. You see this in the rise of homeschooling and religious attendance among young families (while the childless scoff at both)
Likewise in the 90s the idea of fearing unintentional pregnancy was intentionally infused into teen oriented TV shows and PSA. It created the idea that pregnancy is something to avoid unless you are super ready which is understood to have moved the needle.
There's something beyond idiotic about a society that frames it's own reproduction as a negative.
I think this makes a lot of sense. The parents of my generation (I am in my 40s) saw no danger in sending their kids to a university where every professor and student peer was super-left.
A lot of their kids (my peers) ended up unmarried and childless as per this article. So in a way those parents got punished by evolutionary forces for not being careful enough about their kids. I can guarantee you that those of my generation who "made it" through that filter are vigilant to ensure it doesn't happen to our kids.
I think the atheist experiment of the last century or so is starting to yield clear evidence of what is and isn't "fit" in the Darwinian sense. Exactly as you are saying.
Want to state up-front, I am a dual citizen: an EU member and the US, and I live in the US. So I hope this gives my view some credibility as being grounded in the dual perspective.
The sentiment we're seeing in this story/comments and thematically is EU's desire to distance from the US - sure in infrastructure - but more so in identity. Which on the high-level I think is a great goal (ie, Europe should have European identity) but is incredibly risky and I am not sure is well thought out, though I could be wrong.
We can say that since 1950s the US and Europe had a familial relationship with the US being a bit of the parent despite being younger. That manifested in everything from protection (US bases in Europe, NATO), money flow, and culture flow. Since the 1950s, America did not become more European but Europe became more American.
Today we're in the adolescent stage of this familial relationship - Europe wants to move out of the house and perhaps even pay for its own cell-phone plan and that could be wonderful because if that leads to a legitimately stronger and more robust Europe, that's great.
But there's risk. Sometimes when the adolescent moves out of the house, they blossom into the fully manifested version of themselves. Other times they fall in with a bad crowd or fail to deal with their internal problems - and whither. It's easy to tell daddy-US to fuck off, it's much harder to not slide into the clutches of Russia and China in the next decade or two, or to deal with the internal demographic crisis.
What worries me for Europe is that it is trying to "distance" more than its trying to "grow." I don't hear people talk about a Europe that's strong, that leads, that innovates - in other words, the motivation is still about the US (just in a negative sense) not about Europe itself and that's not a good sign.
I still don't sense a true vibe of resurgence coming out of my native continent. Difficult problems you've always had tend to come to a head once you actually move out of your parents house. And while it's great (or at least cute) that you can switch to a European e-mail provider that's very far from what it actually takes to survive and thrive as a country in the long run. Hope it pans out.