For reference, we are talking about $7.8 million in today's US dollars, at time of death.
This hardly counts. You would probably be surprised how many people have this level of assets - liquid or in property. All those houses you can't afford because people were grandfathered in with low property tax rates? Yeah you probably don't want to know.
If you would like to learn more about that, you would have to extrapolate as all "net worth" estimators cannot account for all sources of wealth and are complete guesses.
Pensioners are living for 30+ years these days.
Index funds, real estate held for 30-60 years, an inch of entrepreneurial effort to make any of those properties cash flow, maybe a couple actual wins.
It's not that improbable. The only problem is that people want to do all that before they are a 70, not when they are 90.
When you walk through a city, like Toronto which this article was about, and see any block, or apartment building, remember that there is an actual human that actually owns that. Each and every one. Even in the run down parts of town, all that stuff has a book value of at least $1 million and is liquid enough to borrow against at the lowest interest rates for further investment. Start counting.
It is a lot. As in, not rare. Not exceptional. Not the same as common, or most. A lot.
It should be evident enough for you not to need a dissertation to modify your worldview.
Not only are most of those apartment building not owned by a single person, but most apartment buildings are financed by huge amounts of debt - so the owner doesn't have the full worth of the building after debt, most of the money is with the banks [0]
I'm not taking issue with your claim that there are plenty of people with a networth of at least 7.5 million - there are millions of them in the US alone.
But most city apartment buildings aren't owned in full by a single person.
The numbers are even more stark for more recent [0]
What’s the reasoning behind the claim in A? It’s extremely common to refinance (and in the US to 1031 exchange out of a property into others; might be a similar program in Canada).
Much of the benefit of commercially owned real-estate comes from being leveraged. Paid-off property will cash flow better per door, but usually not per million of equity.
I don't understand this point of view. I think often in saying this the implication is that you wouldn't make the same choice. That somehow you would resist the same urges that poorer people face. But who are you to say you wouldn't if you were in their shoes? You don't know the stress they face or their desperation, their life experiences. We're all human.
So you believe everyone has perfect control over their own choices, actions, reaction, faculties, in the face of all the overt and hidden influences that others seek to have upon them?
It's not a straw man, and you didn't answer the question. Rephrased, do you believe that all the choices you have made are the same as they would have been if you had been free of outside hidden influence? Do you believe that is true for everyone's choices?
Of course we make our own choices, but the question is whether those choices are completely ours, an expression of full conscious agency, free of any polluting influence. And for all our choices, both the ones we think hard about, and the ones when we're exhausted and our attention is split.
Do you believe "personal accountability" extends to accepting the blame for someone else's manipulative intent?
People have children for many reasons. Some of them are questionable ..a lot of it is because of religion. I remember reading about one who conceived to bring a bone marrow donor for a health compromised child.
At some point, we have to ask ourselves..why does the human species want to procreate?
Yeah, 99% Invisible did an episode on this a while back. It really was a wicked thing to do, and in the process also bought out the worst in society as a whole.
Nah. They did it to themselves. Like the three men who hated each other and had to share a house (or lose it). I'd be more interested in whether they bothered to try. Which would have been self-inflicted as well.
Possibly not as sadistic as the judge handling the will:
> But some mothers who had more than nine kids still weren’t allowed a shot at the prize. Pauline Clarke was one of them; she had 10 children within the timeline — the first five with her former husband and the second five with a different man, one she lived with after her separation from her husband. Middleton was not impressed. “‘Children,’ when used in any testamentary document, always means legitimate children,” he wrote in his judgment. Instead of $9 million, Clarke was eventually given a settlement of just over $200,000, and that came only after a lengthy lawsuit.
Yes, in the sense of whether someone is a “legitimate child” of the deceased in a normal will (still absolutely repugnant that “illegitimate children” could be excluded by default, but not this judge’s fault).
However, it seems clear the judge used that definition to change the rules of the contest, which makes no sense.
The point is that legally (in the eyes of the judge) these were not children of the parties - regardless of the biological situation. I assume that this was standard legal process then and was applied to inheritance and other legal matters. The judge was simply applying existing law and custom by interpreting the words of the contest. This is why you have lawyers write these, although based on what's else this guy did, causing some confusion was likely the point.
It's actually not clear to me (even from the will itself, which is just about legible in the image) that he intended it to be announced as a competition.
One could read it as a donation to the largest single Toronto family, i.e. a PR(family)G for a likely quite destitute household.
Although, I suppose, there would not really be a reason to delay for ten years in that case. (It could be 'most in the ten years leading up to my death'.)
Its a million fucking dollars, and all I need to do is enjoy getting laid and endure the challenge of raising another kid like I did in my first few ones? Sign me up!
IIRC from when I heard this story on This American Life, the women in the running were already having a lot of babies and didn't exactly require much encouragement to keep on keeping on.
But I found the whole story depressing, many people take creating more people so lightly and often their belief system embraces a blanket "more is always good/better" stance.
It might be the ultimate endeavor. Right now we live in relative scarcity, so resource gathering dominate our culture. But imagine a thousand years from now when robots produce everything, and material is plenty. What do we do then? What's our purpose as a species? A good candidate is striving to maximise healthy and dignified earthly life across the universe.
> > ANYONE who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite universe is either a madman or an economist
Of course it is true that in a finite universe, exponential growth can only continue for a finite amount of time.
But that time could easily be far longer than you or I will live to see. We could be centuries, millennia, maybe even millions of years, away from the peak.
The peak of human civilisation might be the point at which every inhabitable (or feasibly terraformable) planet in the galaxy has been colonised. (That assumes that intergalactic travel will never be feasible – an assumption which is probably true, but we can't be certain about it.) Peak galactic colonisation could easily be several million years hence–if we ever get there. Of course, we could quite easily annihilate ourselves a whole lot sooner than that, or interstellar colonisation could turn out to be permanently technologically or economically infeasible, or a bunch of other possibilities. But that's the thing, nobody knows where the peak is, worst case scenario is we could be living in it right now, best case scenario is it could be millions of years into the future, and lots of possibilities in between those two extremes.
Better? As in a value judgement? I wasn't talking about that.
I am simply talking about when humanity reaches peak exponential growth. Staying on the one planet, it has to happen a lot sooner than if we colonise other planets in the solar system and then go on to colonise other star systems as well. With galactic colonisation, the peak could easily be millions of years away. Without it, the peak has to be a lot sooner than that.
First, we need to get to 100 years from now without a collapse in our technological abilities, which is not a given considering how bad our general understanding of science and technology is at the moment.
History shows that whatever our “purpose as a species” is, those with more power will want to take more from those without. This is incompatible with “maximis[ing] healthy and dignified earthly life” for most of the population. And there is nothing to be optimistic about; this won’t change in a century or a millenium.
Well most developed nations have dropped below replacement rate on new births with population growth only sustained by immigration. We'll likely soon seen what the "less is more" looks like for new people, I'm not optimistic.
While there is less research into men's fertility and education, in developed countries evidence suggests that highly-educated men display higher levels of childbearing compared to less-educated men.
Not necessarily removing, but making them more rare. A modern woman may have one or two children, but for going above the replacement rate, a number of them should have at least three. This quickly becomes a full-time job.
Only on very long timescales, looking at worldwide fertility rates over just the last 100 years shows how dramatically this can change. Further, if the male vs female reproduction rate for a slice of the population is vastly different, the number of genetic grandchildren may be above replacement rate even if their children are at or below replacement rate.
They still value GDP growth, which they believe requires population growth, so they promote growth overseas and immigration, so most countries with below replacement rates are still growing in population.
People seem to understand that if you move a factory from one country to another you haven't decreased its pollution, especially if the new country has laxer environmental regulations. If you offshore population growth, you haven't decreased population growth either.
I'm not that optimistic either, but hope we learn from examples like Mechai Viravaidya in Thailand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgMNhMRgkHE that nations can manage populations voluntarily, increasing stability, peace, and abundance per person -- no eugenics, One Child policy, or racism. More like the opposite.
The first thing that came to mind was Robert Heinlein’s ‘Howard Families’. And his later ‘Methuselah’s children’.
Heinlein was a mixed bag. Mostly nuts. But his meta concepts and storylines were way ahead of his time(50-70s)..and some would say even by today’s standards. Still..one of favourite early sci fi authors.
[..] The Howard Families are a fictional group of people created by the author Robert A. Heinlein.
According to Heinlein, the Howard Foundation was started in the 19th century by Ira Howard, a millionaire dying of old age in his forties, for the purpose of extending human lifespan. Howard himself did not live to see the outcome; he simply endowed the experiment with his own fortune, and the trustees of the Howard Foundation used the limited scientific knowledge of the time to create a selective breeding human program to encourage, financially, people of long-lived ancestry to have children together. The Howard Foundation is greatly enriched during the Great Depression by knowledge gained through time travel so that they get out of the stock market before the crash and invest in gold rather than cash and are able to reinvest in stocks that rebound after the crash.[1]
The novel Methuselah's Children is focused on the Howard Families and their quest for acceptance on Earth and other planets. [..]
I wouldn't call Heinlein nuts. I think he was deeply interested in the idea of how social mores are a reflection of the times and conditions they exist in. It's one of the things that set him above his peers. The technological advances and space cowboy stuff was just a backdrop to discuss philosophy and morality. He did so in a generally entertaining way. I don't know that he was advocating any particular philosophy or moralism. He was just exploring them. The difference in points of view between Stranger in a strange land, starship troopers, and the moon is a harsh mistress demonstrate that.
So one person could have such outsized effect on a community through the market forces he created.
What if this force could be used for good? Is there a way I could write my will to convince a large number of people to solve climate change, for example?
The standard way of doing this is to make a prize given to the first research team to accomplish some breakthrough. See for example the DARPA Grand Challenge (self driving cars), the Brain Preservation Prize (preserving and scanning ever larger brains / brain samples at ever increasing resolution), or, most famously, the Nobel Prize (whatever the "best" research in the field as a whole is that year).
I am not sure that generates much real improvement in the world, surely funding research is more impactful that giving a prize for work that would have been done anyway?
My hunch would be that early on in the process of innovation, you're quite a distance from profiting from that research. Unless you have pockets deep enough to go all the way, there's potentially value in encouraging many people to try and get slightly further on solving challenging problems in the open, so that all can learn.
Then he left his house in Jamaica to three men who hated one another, on the condition that they own it together.
I really like this guy. Humor is a slow play and if you can play your hand even after death then you have mastered humor.
I had an uncle like this, I hated him as a kid but he made me a man that does not take everything too serious. Unfortunately he passed right as I was becoming a man so I only realized his life lessons in reflection.
This is a great idea. If I were rich, I'd leave my fortune to the three biggest religious leaders in my city (I am an atheist). The condition is that every decision to spend that money would have to be unanimous and public.
That's not 'atheist' - that's 'deeply cynical' and obviously completely misunderstanding religion.
For example, Catholic, Protestant an Jewish leadership of any city, given those terms, would have little problem finding a project to spend that money on. Either one of numerous charities or here [1] to start.
I think the title of the article, is not informative either.
I think there's a lot of intersection, even among religions. (Feeding the poor, for example. Or helping widows and orphans.)
I imagine the 3 would quickly reach agreement, but they'd also agree to keep your views (atheist) out of the announcements. Can't advertise good deeds of that nature, of course!
The Judge Rotenberg Center is a school in Canton, Massachusetts that uses the methods of ABA to perform behavior modification in children with developmental disabilities. Before it was banned in 2020, the center used a device called a Graduated Electronic Decelerator (GED) to deliver electric skin shocks as aversives. The Judge Rotenberg center has been condemned by the United Nations for torture as a result of this practice.[10] While many human rights and disability rights advocates have campaigned to shut down the center, as of 2020 it remains open. Six students have died of preventable incidents at the school since it opened in 1971.
No offense intended, but if you can't see the link between sadism and humor you're probably not looking hard enough.
the psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler once said 'every time a person laughs they are expressing a guilt-ridden need to get revenge upon society'.
I wouldn't go that far, and the journey to discovery is your own.. but humor/sadism/malice have been intertwined in the human psyche since as far back as anyone knows.
Things get funny at the right perspective. Our lives are too short, living on a pale blue dot of a space rock floating on some galaxy we dont even know much of.
At that scale you realize how insignificant we are and how pointless it is to be petty about taking things too personally instead of finding resolve and cherishing our short-lived lives lol
The actual three men could be played that way for amusement precisely because they are not "First World".
First world people would and could just throw middle finger once narcissist starts to play that way. The third world men in question could be used this way, because they are poor.
Not necessarily so... they definitely aren't rich, otherwise it wouldn't be a draw. But that doesn't mean they are "poor". They could be middle class and want to live on the island. The house could be worth a lot more than anything they could afford - even if they aren't poor. The area could be attractive and otherwise unobtainable...
And more importantly... "poor" is subjective... Someone in America who is poor is still more than likely in the top percentile of those alive today around the world.
Edit: And... looking deeper because your comment actually got me interested...
"To wit, Millar bequeathed (for their lifetimes) his Jamaican summer house to three lawyers, T.F. Galt, J.D. Montgomery, and James Newerson, he knew hated each other, but would now be forced to share a common vacation home. He noted that “upon the death of the last survivor of them I direct my Executors… to sell the same and give the proceeds to the council of the city of Kingston, Jamaica, for distribution among the poor of that city…”
So 3 lawyers had to share a vacation home? Which was later sold for charity?
Without editing my previous comment... I seriously doubt 3 lawyers that have to share a vacation home are "poor" by any stretch of the imagination.
So yes... I stand by my original comment that first world problems are funny.
I'm actually kind of surprised that the winners only had nine kids. That sounds like a lot, but even as late as the 1950s it wasn't uncommon for Roman Catholic families to have that many kids. My own great uncle (a WWII vet) and his wife had 10 children in the 1940s to 1960s.
To be clear: this is 9 kids in 10 years. It's very difficult to do more than that intentionally, especially in an era where miscarriages are fairly common.
It doesn’t change your point, but miscarriages are still very common. I feel I have to say this because there is some stigma associated with them. But they really are not that rare, and often completely independent of the woman’s behaviour (i.e. it happens also often to healthy women who do everything correctly, not only drunkards or junkies).
Ha, what a classic example of the Streisand effect:
> While there were a few mentions in the press early on, news coverage of the Derby didn’t really pick up until 1932, when the Ontario government tried to have the will nullified and the money given to the University of Toronto. After a huge public outcry — the Toronto Daily Star accused the government of resorting to “communism in the raw” — the government’s claim was withdrawn. At that point, several other women seem to have realized that their family size put them in contention and started to compete as well.
It's exactly the right accusation. Trying to interfere in private affairs and basically deposing private property by force is the basic definition what communism did.
First thing communism did in my country in 1947 was deposing private property by force. And people who fought against that were imprisoned, killed and called "enemies of the people".
You are comparing handling of 'private property' of a long dead man and his controvertial and unprecendented prank-will with gulag system - this comes across very silly to me. By labelling this as communism, you are trivialising it.
Fun thought (for some defn. of 'fun' anyway) - what's the 'optimum' number? Selfishly, hyper-rationally, how many children would you have?
It's not zero, because of their later life. But it's certainly not infinite, because of their early dependence.
I suspect on average we're pretty good at arriving at the (ever-changeable) optimum, or close to it, naturally. Maybe it's just as simple as 'as many as you can afford the childhood of'. But then, what's 'afford'.
Anecdotal but I pushed this number to the limit with 5 kids (went for a 4th and had twins). Our pediatrician said (subjectively of course) that she found her happiest families had 4 or more kids. Not sure why that would be the case, but we are certainly a happy bunch.
"There is nothing intrinsic to parenthood that makes people less happy—and nothing intrinsic to parenthood that makes people any happier, for that matter."
"In some countries, most notably Norway and Hungary, parents are actually happier than non-parents."
The fact that having children makes people unhappy only tells a truth about societies being wrongly structured, rather than anything about the happiness of having children.
That's also from a strictly American perspective where having children is much different in aggregate than other societies. If you look at LDS communities they tend to be a pretty happy group while having much larger families than the average US household.
well, you probably want to have one son and many daughters. You can trade your daughters for money (dowry, bride price, etc) and put a lot resources into you son so he becomes successful and get as much reproductive access as possible.
Not really, everyone (or just every woman, or man, however) could be predisposed to whether they give birth to sons or daughters; on average then it'd still work out OK. (Might even be better, since it'd discourage interbreeding.)
That's a very interesting proposal, but I wonder how it would work out in practice. As all eggs have one X chromosome, that effectively creates a system three sexes: Female, Male (X-gamete predisposition) and Male (Y-gamete predisposition), which we can call F, Mx, and My. The "x" and "y" predispositions might also be heritable with some frequency ("h"). Perhaps the predisposition is not absolute, but just a probability "p" favouring one gamete over the other.
I wonder what kind of equilibrium this system would come to. For now I'll assume that females have no preference for Mx over My or vise-versa.
For reductio-ad-absurdum, let's imagine what would happen with p=1 and h=1. Then Mx fathers have only daughters, and after one generation, the population is entirely My and F. After two generations, it's only My, and there is no third generation.
Next let's see what would happen with p=1 and h=0. Again, Mx fathers have only daughters; My fathers now have 50% My sons and 50% Mx sons. Starting from a population that is 50% F, 25% Mx, and 25% My, the second generation is again 50% F, 25% Mx, and 25% My, and with all parents having an equal number of offspring. So at a glance that looks like a stable population, but we'd need to look deeper to see whether any initial small unbalance between F, My, Mx returns to that equilibrium or diverges, and also whether there's any advantage to a higher "h" or a lower "p" that could gradually cause those traits to spread. For example if some kids with a "p=0.5" gene have an advantage over p=1, then over time the Mx and My distinction will get wiped out and we'd just end up with M and F.
I'm too lazy to analyze it but it would be an interesting system to simulate!
Until the kids leave the house. Then the parents overtake their no child counterparts like crazy.
I’d also be curious to see this broken out by economic situation. I’d wager parents who don’t feel financially burdened by children score far happier than those that are stressed financially.
this analysis is not that impressive. it is flat out lazy to take huge, disparate groups and act like having a kid or not is a variable we can causally use to evaluate, well, anything. and let's not kid ourselves, it starts at the title (does having children /make/ people happy), and contains some weak tea "statistically signifcant" analysis without anything else that markedly affects happiness - income, location, ...
it's just: here's a graph, here's a significance test, here's a narrative. no attempts or tests to try and evaluate while controlling for any other things e.g. income.
don't let this analysis influence your thinking too much.
It's interesting how politely this act is described. For example:
> He wanted to give that wealth away. But he wanted to do it in as roguish a way as possible.
As opposed to what it actually was. A rich scumbag brutally preying on and abusing poor people, performing a sadistic social experiment for his own amusement. This man was a monster and then some. They probably should have checked his properties for murder subjects.
200K is still a bunch at that time.
Are you sure the judge wasn't really just trying to make as many families happy as possible?
(There's an 11, a 10, and four 9's: how do you make a judgement that makes everybody less miserable?)
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadThis hardly counts. You would probably be surprised how many people have this level of assets - liquid or in property. All those houses you can't afford because people were grandfathered in with low property tax rates? Yeah you probably don't want to know.
these aren't the same edible rich people that the populist furor is being made towards
Pensioners are living for 30+ years these days.
Index funds, real estate held for 30-60 years, an inch of entrepreneurial effort to make any of those properties cash flow, maybe a couple actual wins.
It's not that improbable. The only problem is that people want to do all that before they are a 70, not when they are 90.
When you walk through a city, like Toronto which this article was about, and see any block, or apartment building, remember that there is an actual human that actually owns that. Each and every one. Even in the run down parts of town, all that stuff has a book value of at least $1 million and is liquid enough to borrow against at the lowest interest rates for further investment. Start counting.
It is a lot. As in, not rare. Not exceptional. Not the same as common, or most. A lot.
It should be evident enough for you not to need a dissertation to modify your worldview.
[0]: https://www.census.gov/prod/1/statbrief/sb96_01.pdf
B) even the person from OP’s article owned business interests in various properties
But most city apartment buildings aren't owned in full by a single person.
The numbers are even more stark for more recent [0]
[0]: https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/who-owns-rental-properties....
Much of the benefit of commercially owned real-estate comes from being leveraged. Paid-off property will cash flow better per door, but usually not per million of equity.
I believe we each make our own choices. I've been poor. I didn't spend my money on gambling or lottery tickets.
Of course we make our own choices, but the question is whether those choices are completely ours, an expression of full conscious agency, free of any polluting influence. And for all our choices, both the ones we think hard about, and the ones when we're exhausted and our attention is split.
Do you believe "personal accountability" extends to accepting the blame for someone else's manipulative intent?
At some point, we have to ask ourselves..why does the human species want to procreate?
> But some mothers who had more than nine kids still weren’t allowed a shot at the prize. Pauline Clarke was one of them; she had 10 children within the timeline — the first five with her former husband and the second five with a different man, one she lived with after her separation from her husband. Middleton was not impressed. “‘Children,’ when used in any testamentary document, always means legitimate children,” he wrote in his judgment. Instead of $9 million, Clarke was eventually given a settlement of just over $200,000, and that came only after a lengthy lawsuit.
However, it seems clear the judge used that definition to change the rules of the contest, which makes no sense.
One could read it as a donation to the largest single Toronto family, i.e. a PR(family)G for a likely quite destitute household.
Although, I suppose, there would not really be a reason to delay for ten years in that case. (It could be 'most in the ten years leading up to my death'.)
It shows how (the vast majority of) people can be so easily manipulated if only you cater to their self interest and greed.
But I found the whole story depressing, many people take creating more people so lightly and often their belief system embraces a blanket "more is always good/better" stance.
It might be the ultimate endeavor. Right now we live in relative scarcity, so resource gathering dominate our culture. But imagine a thousand years from now when robots produce everything, and material is plenty. What do we do then? What's our purpose as a species? A good candidate is striving to maximise healthy and dignified earthly life across the universe.
A nice video that goes in depth about how people just don't have an intuition about exponential growth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqcHG7QUK9k
Of course it is true that in a finite universe, exponential growth can only continue for a finite amount of time.
But that time could easily be far longer than you or I will live to see. We could be centuries, millennia, maybe even millions of years, away from the peak.
The peak of human civilisation might be the point at which every inhabitable (or feasibly terraformable) planet in the galaxy has been colonised. (That assumes that intergalactic travel will never be feasible – an assumption which is probably true, but we can't be certain about it.) Peak galactic colonisation could easily be several million years hence–if we ever get there. Of course, we could quite easily annihilate ourselves a whole lot sooner than that, or interstellar colonisation could turn out to be permanently technologically or economically infeasible, or a bunch of other possibilities. But that's the thing, nobody knows where the peak is, worst case scenario is we could be living in it right now, best case scenario is it could be millions of years into the future, and lots of possibilities in between those two extremes.
Also, aesthetic.
Also, reduced chance of extinction (before each given point in time).
I am simply talking about when humanity reaches peak exponential growth. Staying on the one planet, it has to happen a lot sooner than if we colonise other planets in the solar system and then go on to colonise other star systems as well. With galactic colonisation, the peak could easily be millions of years away. Without it, the peak has to be a lot sooner than that.
History shows that whatever our “purpose as a species” is, those with more power will want to take more from those without. This is incompatible with “maximis[ing] healthy and dignified earthly life” for most of the population. And there is nothing to be optimistic about; this won’t change in a century or a millenium.
Huge mistakes were made some time ago and there's no recovery in sight.
While there is less research into men's fertility and education, in developed countries evidence suggests that highly-educated men display higher levels of childbearing compared to less-educated men.
Education however reduces women’s fertility.
The people that built the modern world voluntarily phase themselves out.
People seem to understand that if you move a factory from one country to another you haven't decreased its pollution, especially if the new country has laxer environmental regulations. If you offshore population growth, you haven't decreased population growth either.
I'm not that optimistic either, but hope we learn from examples like Mechai Viravaidya in Thailand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgMNhMRgkHE that nations can manage populations voluntarily, increasing stability, peace, and abundance per person -- no eugenics, One Child policy, or racism. More like the opposite.
Heinlein was a mixed bag. Mostly nuts. But his meta concepts and storylines were way ahead of his time(50-70s)..and some would say even by today’s standards. Still..one of favourite early sci fi authors.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_families
[..] The Howard Families are a fictional group of people created by the author Robert A. Heinlein.
According to Heinlein, the Howard Foundation was started in the 19th century by Ira Howard, a millionaire dying of old age in his forties, for the purpose of extending human lifespan. Howard himself did not live to see the outcome; he simply endowed the experiment with his own fortune, and the trustees of the Howard Foundation used the limited scientific knowledge of the time to create a selective breeding human program to encourage, financially, people of long-lived ancestry to have children together. The Howard Foundation is greatly enriched during the Great Depression by knowledge gained through time travel so that they get out of the stock market before the crash and invest in gold rather than cash and are able to reinvest in stocks that rebound after the crash.[1]
The novel Methuselah's Children is focused on the Howard Families and their quest for acceptance on Earth and other planets. [..]
What if this force could be used for good? Is there a way I could write my will to convince a large number of people to solve climate change, for example?
I really like this guy. Humor is a slow play and if you can play your hand even after death then you have mastered humor.
I had an uncle like this, I hated him as a kid but he made me a man that does not take everything too serious. Unfortunately he passed right as I was becoming a man so I only realized his life lessons in reflection.
Now, that would be hilarious to watch!
For example, Catholic, Protestant an Jewish leadership of any city, given those terms, would have little problem finding a project to spend that money on. Either one of numerous charities or here [1] to start.
I think the title of the article, is not informative either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interfaith_Center_of_New_York
Not sure why that would be hilarious?
I imagine the 3 would quickly reach agreement, but they'd also agree to keep your views (atheist) out of the announcements. Can't advertise good deeds of that nature, of course!
And maybe your uncle was just asshole and you would be perfectly fine person without him too.
Here's a quote from that link:
The Judge Rotenberg Center is a school in Canton, Massachusetts that uses the methods of ABA to perform behavior modification in children with developmental disabilities. Before it was banned in 2020, the center used a device called a Graduated Electronic Decelerator (GED) to deliver electric skin shocks as aversives. The Judge Rotenberg center has been condemned by the United Nations for torture as a result of this practice.[10] While many human rights and disability rights advocates have campaigned to shut down the center, as of 2020 it remains open. Six students have died of preventable incidents at the school since it opened in 1971.
No offense intended, but if you can't see the link between sadism and humor you're probably not looking hard enough.
the psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler once said 'every time a person laughs they are expressing a guilt-ridden need to get revenge upon society'.
I wouldn't go that far, and the journey to discovery is your own.. but humor/sadism/malice have been intertwined in the human psyche since as far back as anyone knows.
At that scale you realize how insignificant we are and how pointless it is to be petty about taking things too personally instead of finding resolve and cherishing our short-lived lives lol
Have some respect for the recently departed and how the OP may feel about that.
"Oh no... I have something worth a lot of money that most people in the world would envy and its such a huge problem!!!"
First world people would and could just throw middle finger once narcissist starts to play that way. The third world men in question could be used this way, because they are poor.
Not necessarily so... they definitely aren't rich, otherwise it wouldn't be a draw. But that doesn't mean they are "poor". They could be middle class and want to live on the island. The house could be worth a lot more than anything they could afford - even if they aren't poor. The area could be attractive and otherwise unobtainable...
And more importantly... "poor" is subjective... Someone in America who is poor is still more than likely in the top percentile of those alive today around the world.
Edit: And... looking deeper because your comment actually got me interested...
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2017/02/last-laugh-m...
"To wit, Millar bequeathed (for their lifetimes) his Jamaican summer house to three lawyers, T.F. Galt, J.D. Montgomery, and James Newerson, he knew hated each other, but would now be forced to share a common vacation home. He noted that “upon the death of the last survivor of them I direct my Executors… to sell the same and give the proceeds to the council of the city of Kingston, Jamaica, for distribution among the poor of that city…”
So 3 lawyers had to share a vacation home? Which was later sold for charity?
Without editing my previous comment... I seriously doubt 3 lawyers that have to share a vacation home are "poor" by any stretch of the imagination.
So yes... I stand by my original comment that first world problems are funny.
> While there were a few mentions in the press early on, news coverage of the Derby didn’t really pick up until 1932, when the Ontario government tried to have the will nullified and the money given to the University of Toronto. After a huge public outcry — the Toronto Daily Star accused the government of resorting to “communism in the raw” — the government’s claim was withdrawn. At that point, several other women seem to have realized that their family size put them in contention and started to compete as well.
that is such a strange accusation
First thing communism did in my country in 1947 was deposing private property by force. And people who fought against that were imprisoned, killed and called "enemies of the people".
It's not zero, because of their later life. But it's certainly not infinite, because of their early dependence.
I suspect on average we're pretty good at arriving at the (ever-changeable) optimum, or close to it, naturally. Maybe it's just as simple as 'as many as you can afford the childhood of'. But then, what's 'afford'.
But then, that still varies according to poor a childhood you're willing to let them have (and to live yourself for the duration).
"In some countries, most notably Norway and Hungary, parents are actually happier than non-parents."
The fact that having children makes people unhappy only tells a truth about societies being wrongly structured, rather than anything about the happiness of having children.
If course this is a evolutionary perspective, if you're talking about what is strictly rational for maximizing happiness, you should go with zero kids: https://ifstudies.org/blog/does-having-children-make-people-...
I wonder what kind of equilibrium this system would come to. For now I'll assume that females have no preference for Mx over My or vise-versa.
For reductio-ad-absurdum, let's imagine what would happen with p=1 and h=1. Then Mx fathers have only daughters, and after one generation, the population is entirely My and F. After two generations, it's only My, and there is no third generation.
Next let's see what would happen with p=1 and h=0. Again, Mx fathers have only daughters; My fathers now have 50% My sons and 50% Mx sons. Starting from a population that is 50% F, 25% Mx, and 25% My, the second generation is again 50% F, 25% Mx, and 25% My, and with all parents having an equal number of offspring. So at a glance that looks like a stable population, but we'd need to look deeper to see whether any initial small unbalance between F, My, Mx returns to that equilibrium or diverges, and also whether there's any advantage to a higher "h" or a lower "p" that could gradually cause those traits to spread. For example if some kids with a "p=0.5" gene have an advantage over p=1, then over time the Mx and My distinction will get wiped out and we'd just end up with M and F.
I'm too lazy to analyze it but it would be an interesting system to simulate!
I’d also be curious to see this broken out by economic situation. I’d wager parents who don’t feel financially burdened by children score far happier than those that are stressed financially.
it's just: here's a graph, here's a significance test, here's a narrative. no attempts or tests to try and evaluate while controlling for any other things e.g. income.
don't let this analysis influence your thinking too much.
IMO: Two if you aren't into kids and have just a boy and a girl. After that, it's all about you and your spouse's personal preference.
If you want more kids, start young.
> He wanted to give that wealth away. But he wanted to do it in as roguish a way as possible.
As opposed to what it actually was. A rich scumbag brutally preying on and abusing poor people, performing a sadistic social experiment for his own amusement. This man was a monster and then some. They probably should have checked his properties for murder subjects.