ExLisper

There continue to be atomic bombs. Do people have natural drive to build them?

If you compare Europe with developing countries a lot of people have comfortable incomes and even in the wealthiest countries birth rates are below replacement levels. You can keep coming with reasons like lack of healthcare, childcare, expensive homes and so on but the fact is that people in Africa don't have any of that and they still have more kids. Even in Europe or US people used to have more kids in way worse economic situation than today. The idea that people felt they have "comfortable income" to have 5 kids while working 6 days a week at a coal mine and living in a one bedroom apartment but can't have kids today because they can't put each one in separate room is just silly. People used to have a lot of kids because it was a necessity. Once the necessity was gone they stopped.

A lot of people want to form a family. They want to have a kid or two. Once they do they stop procreating because there's no natural drive to keep having more and more children. They keep having sex because there is natural drive for that but the drive to have kids is just something you made up.

In developing countries people have kids because it's an investment. You need kids to help you work the fields, take care of the house and take care of you when you're old. Infant mortality is high so family planning is difficult and people have a lot of kids. Once certain economical level is reached and people can count on social security to take care of them when they are old kids become an expense, not investment and, surprise surprise, people stop having kids. Almost universally in every developed country in the world birth rates are below replacement levels, even in countries with best social programs and highest life satisfaction. So no, it's not true.

This doesn't say we have infants because we love protecting them. It says why we protect them once we have them. If you don't understand this there's really nothing to talk about. I will just assume there's no proof for your first statement and it's most probably false.

This is about protecting infants not about drive to procreation.

Humans have a natural drive to procreate

Source?

That's not the point. EU wanted to go for 100% reduction in CO2 emissions from cars sold after 2035. Now car manufacturers are pushing for 90% reduction because they failed to adapt in time. In reality there's only 30% reduction in hybrids. Even if the infrastructure is there and we reach 90% of battery driving for plug-ins that's still less than the initial plan. But there are no plans to actually achieve the 90% battery usage so it's all bullshit. They simply want to keep selling gas engines and plug-in hybrids are just the latest lie they want to use to avoid the ban. The first lie was e-fuels but I guess they realized now this is not going to work.

They want to keep making money on polluting technology and it's up to us to figure out how to create the infrastructure to make it less polluting. It's plastic recycling all over again.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/16/plug-in-hybrids-pollute-almost-as-much-as-petrol-cars-report-finds

"27% of driving was done in electric mode" - this is how. It doesn't point at any reason for that. And yes, there may be a solution to this but we don't know if it even exists. We should first try to make plug-ins more efficient and then consider excluding them from the ban. Of course this decision has nothing to do with efficiency, it's just Germany desperately trying to save their weakening economy.

So from 2035 it was supposed to be possible to only sell cars with 100% reduction in CO2 emissions. They want to change it to 90% reduction and still allow to sell plug-in-hybrids which is bullshit because recent analysis of real life usage show that plug-in hybrids run on gas most of the time and are not nearly as efficient as estimated. They should focus on building charging infrastructure instead. German car industry is dying anyway.

UK is not Canada. I don't know if you heard but they left EU because they were going to find a ton of new trading partners and US was supposed to be one of the big ones. They are in an incredibly weak position and US is trying to exploit it. I wouldn't be surprised if they paid the bribe to Trump through a settlement to save this deal.

In unrelated news, US suspended $31B trade deal with UK.

No, seriously: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/15/us-pauses-tech-prosperity-deal-britain-donald-trump-keir-starmer

I live in a democracy and don't want to bring children into this.