I was born a man and identify as a man, but according to Stouffer's Lasagna, I'm a family of 4.

That's only cause the economy isn't that bad yet.

That was me and spring rolls. I got a good bottle of soy sauce and chili sauce at the Asian market they don’t sell anywhere else in town. I know they aren’t perfect but it saves a lot of money.

A lot of what people miss is the importance of safety and security. People don't have kids when they reach a certain income level. They have kids when they are reasonably confident they can give their children a decent living.

A subsistence farmer in Subsaharan Africa can have a much more secure existence than the working poor of countries like the US. People are poor, but they live on land they own or at least have assured access to through shared community rights. They may not have much money, but they have security. They can have kids, and at the very least, the kids can always take over the farm from their parents. The parents probably want the kids to go get an education and be more successful than themselves, but at the very least, the kids will have no worse a life than the parents do.

Compare that to developed countries. You pay monthly for rent that can skyrocket at any time, paid for with a job that can disappear at any time. And I would say raising kids in a rural African village is probably feels a lot more reasonable than trying to raise kids in a studio apartment built in a car-dependent American suburb.

Poorer regions usually are more conservative too.

Which means that women are more likely to stay at home taking care of the kids. And if they do work, they do so part time. Which still leaves time to take care of the kids.

The regions with low birthrates usually have women working full time. And full time means 8h+.

I bet people would be having more kids if people that can work from home, worked from home. And if full time meant 6h instead of 8h+.

That way, instead of working husband + stay at home mom, we could have commuting parent and WFH parent.

With the added benefit of commuting parent having a shorter commute since there would be a lot less people commuting.

The poorest may reproduce the most because they are going to be poor either way, and they might also not have as much means to avoid it. But it is definitely a consideration for middle class people in developed nations who may have reasonably comfortable lives if they don't reproduce but will put themselves into hardship if they do.

I think there's actually a bath tub curve with reproduction.

money likely has little to do with reproductive rates Or you need to buy yourself a way out of this cycle.

Turns out it was the men that wanted the children the whole time. Which definitely tracks with my experience. Men want women to sacrifice for them.

Usually they have lots of kids so they have kids to help with the farm plus most of these countries are very conservative

This perception is largely overblown though, there is some difference but the poor in western civilisation still do not produce enough children on average to get to a sustainable population number.

What might be a part of it is that globally the poorest region there is a lot of internal solidarity and community building.

Helping each other out becomes second nature if it means that the neighbourhood will have your back during worst times. Forming the village to raise a child.
Add other factors like normalised child labor and indeed no access to contraception or general healthcare (including normalised child death, my European great grand parents have also mentioned the concept of basically “backup” children and normalised loss of siblings)

Some people migrating from such cultures may take some of it with them. People who raised around big families may want to replicate their image of a family but this seems to rapidly decline with each following generation.

The west has a long history of living from exploitation. we build a culture around “civilized /s” families having wealth and became financially competitive. When things go bad there is rarely ever someone to help because either “i don’t have this problem so it must be your own fault” or “no one helped me when i was in that position”

I don’t remember my latest source on this and i spend to long typing this to go look but the statistics i saw that showed that immigration is not the answer to declining population because they don’t produce enough kids either for sustainability was recent data from this year.

Or its causal and having kids makes you poor.

It’s weird too because there is a burger place down the street from me that literally gets all of their ingredients locally. Buns from a local bakery, beef and potatoes from local farms, etc… A single patty combo with fries/tots and a drink is $13.79. Meanwhile down the street McDonald’s (I know McDonald’s doesn’t use Sysco but it’s the easiest burger comparison) is charging like $12.99 for a Big Mac combo that almost certainly has less beef in it and is nowhere near the same quality on any level in any capacity.

We are reaching a point where corporate overhead is so huge that it might actually bring back small businesses.

You guys don't ACTUALLY get asked for tips at stores... Right?

Always takes me a second to remember you Americans use entrée to refer to the main dish, lol.

Can be. Rarely is.

Already done, thanks to Elon unleashing the screwworm on the American cattle industry.

If you have an IN&OUT, its appeal/line is due to the fact that you can buy a plain burger for $2.50. If you like fast food. Was $2 in 2020.

Sit down in a real restaurant, and it’s $19-$23. With fries.

Granted, that’s still not as bad as paying the markup on pancakes.

And it actually tastes good, not just salty and/or sweet.

Tomatoes pay out, and they’re not difficult.

Strawberries multiply if you put them directly in the ground. Recommend Hoods, they’re amazing. Small, but punchy with flavor. Everbearing taste like Driscolls, even freshly picked. Again, not finicky to grow, and they’re perennial. Granted our temps don’t go below the 20s. Fahrenheit.

No, it’s not the same. And I don’t trust me to prep or source raw fish for that, so it’s limited to veggies and cooked or smoked salmon at home. I finally have the rice how we like it after 6 yrs though. Also. If you know of an uncanned source of freshwater eel in the US, do tell. I’d like to buy it like any other fish, it’s delicious, but here we are.

My point is, it only feels worth the money to eat our, as a very occasional treat, if it’s something not easily sourced or prepped at home. Like eel sushi.

Yes, it's ထ + 1.

There is a market for trash food at trash food prices. Sucks we don't have any sort of mechanism in our communist shit hole country to fill unexploited market niches. Capitalism, real capitalism, would have fixed this. Its priests told me so.

I live in a country where hospitality staff makes fair wages. Although it could be better. But at least the responsibility for them making enough money isn't put on customers but on the employers, as it should be.

At the place I worked at for a while we didn't do tips. There was no system for it. If people insisted on giving a cash tip, we (the employees) would use the money to buy food for homeless people. Everyone was happy with that.

This is from the "The IT Crowd"

If you haven't seen it, you really should give it a look.