I don't think Musk and Andreesseen are who most people would associate with the concept of pronatalism. The headline was surprising to me because most of the people I know who could be described as "pronatalist" are strongly for WFH policies.

>I don't think Musk and Andreesseen are who most people would associate with the concept of pronatalism.

Musk is for sure. Doesn't he have like 100 kids because he's constantly trying to get women to become pregnant by his sperm?

I associate the concept of pronatalism with also wanting to be involved in your kids' lives, which Musk seems to have no interest in.

You can't be as deeply involved in your kids' lives if you've got 8 of them. There is a reason why every large family has sibling-parents.

Visible elements of pronatalism are largely focused on assigning a particular family role to women and trying to increase the supply of a particular kind of desirable baby (often white, but sometimes focused on IQ selection and other eugenic elements).

I only know one family with >=8 kids (they have 10) and not that well so I can't really comment on them. I know many with 4-6 kids though. It's true that in most cases the women have a traditional family role (not always though, I know one couple where the wife is a very successful cardiologist and the husband is an athletic trainer). Parental involvement is usually higher in these families than among the 2-3 children, 2 professional parent families I know, mostly because one parent is either not working or working in a reduced capacity.

The eugenics part doesn't match my experience at all. I've never seen any evidence that people who are having large families are motivated by that.

I suspect that parental involvement is higher in aggregate but not when it comes to the time dedicated to each child.

Every younger sibling from a large family that I know was in large part raised by their older siblings.

>I associate the concept of pronatalism with also wanting to be involved in your kids' lives

Then don't because it's just wrong. Very few, if any, of the "more babies, bigger families" types have any interest in or concern for the children after they're born. In fact they're usually the ones fighting tooth and nail to prevent any kinds of programs or services that might help the resulting children and families.

For them it's just a pure numbers game/bizarre sexual fetish disguised as a philosophy.

This is not true among the people I personally know with large families.

> The US spends ~$14,570 per person on healthcare. Japan spends ~$5,790 and has the highest life expectancy in the OECD.

Ethnic Japanese in the US live have about the same life expectancy as Japanese living in Japan do (within 1 year). US GDP per capita is about 2.4x Japan's. So the numbers don't look nearly as bad when you adjust for that. The higher drug prices in the US are definitely part of it, part of it is our population is less healthy in general (fatter, worse diet, more drug and alcohol abuse), but part of it is Baumol's cost disease[0]. Biggest barrier to lowering healthcare costs in the US is it probably requires paying doctors, nurses, etc. significantly less and most of them work hard and feel like they deserve to be paid as well as they do.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

Edit: to some extent high US drug prices are a public good that subsidizes healthcare for the rest of the world. I don't know the data but I would guess the US is responsible for a disproportionate share of new drugs.

These sort of commentaries on AI are the modern equivalent of medieval theologians debating how many angels could congregate in one place.

A lot of that is to get around laws that say corporations can't practice medicine. These are state-laws, not federal so in every state it's different.

I believe the monkey gland is called that because around the time it was invented there was a surgeon (Serge Voronoff) who was promoting a surgery in which he would implant baboon testicles into men (there was a corresponding surgery for women as well). It was supposed to improve the libido. An early, probably ineffective form of hormone replacement therapy.

There is even a wikipedia page on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_gland

Which still sounds super fake to me. It takes a host of modern drugs to prevent rejection when doing human-to-human transplants. I have long odds that monkey tissue would result in anything but a painful, septic death.

As a medical benchmark, penicillin was discovered in 1928.

Edit: I was ignoring the obvious - sham surgery! Just leave a bit of a scar, maybe inject them with some cocaine, and everyone comes out smiling.

I think most of the ostensible age discrimination is explained by the tech industry's massive growth over the past 50 years (means more young people are hired than old people because they have the skills).

As well as overproduction of CS grads in the last 10/15 years. Much like law grads a generation earlier. Wonder who's next, MDs perhaps?..

Not a chance for MD's. MD's are the only degree where jobs are guaranteed, but graduation is not. They will always have a shortage.

Algorithmic betting is widespread in horse racing now. I can't remember the exact figures but I think it's estimated to be about 40% of the total handle. There is a company that will allow individuals to connect directly to the betting pools and wager automatically. It's rumored that the biggest two bettors are betting over $1bn a year (of course a lot of that is recycled from prior payouts).

How did you choose the artworks for the artworks section of your site?

It’s a hi-res artwork from Unsplash that I’ve sampled random croppings from.

He had a sharpe ratio similar to early Rentech and used much less leverage. Probably would have had similar returns to them if if he used similar amounts of leverage. From interviews with him he seems extremely risk averse. Alumni of his fund now run one of the few firms that could be considered a Rentech peer.

Benter allegedly did use something like this in his later models so it probably does matter.