Aight, I agree it’s better to give positive help at one group instead of trying to punish the other.

I’m literally going to financially reward my wife for taking time off work in order to take care of our kid.

Parenting is labour. When you’re parenting, you can’t be doing a different job.

My wife’s parents in Indonesia don’t have a pension much. It’s barely anything. Her mom just gets money from my wife and her 2 sisters.

That’s how it used to be for a long time, pension is relatively new.

So in the vast majority of history, parents always were financially rewarded for having children.

Median age in Indonesia is 30, while in Belgium it’s 42. While we’re far wealthier in resources. People just stopped having children because it wasn’t necessary anymore.

We can’t act like this isn’t a problem, unless the people that willingly caused the aging population issue take full responsibility and go through hardships in order to help the society battle a period of low work force.

These families already are adequately supported. We need to find a way to guide people into the actions we want them to do.

Like, they want me to stop using the car to work. Okay, they allow everyone at my hospital to use their taxes to pay for a commuting e bike. It’s a financial incentive. (Don’t worry I’m not a healthcare worker, just administration, I am not the right person to work with people in need).

Indeed there are exceptions and therefore exemptions. If a medical examination says that it’s difficult for you or your partner to have children, then they’d be exempted of any punishment.

I don’t think it’s psychologically a smart move to punish not having kids, but to reward having kids. That’s why I say “extra pension”. (By behind closed doors reducing pensions in general first, but they don’t know that).

Helping people that can’t have kids… We could allocate resources to them to help them adopt a child. Something like that. Once again, psychologically it would help them accept this. People give them the option that nature didn’t provide them.

We’re competing against the funds actually. I own ETFs that tracks the Stoxx 600. It has a yearly expense of 0,07% while bank funds would take like 2% or whatever.

Personally I’m not even thinking about my pension, cannot know what will happen in 37 years so I’m definitely taking it into my two own hands to accumulate assets.

Now, I understand why a pension is desirable. It’s a safety net. And I agree with that. High minimum pension for anyone who is unable to work due to old age. Just like for people who can’t work for other reasons.

But as Belgian, I know a lot of people that try and take advantage of our social safety nets. For a lot of people it’s not because they need it, but view it as an extra passive income while doing nothing.

That’s damaging to the social democrats. We need to get rid of the abuse, the corruption. We need to motivate people to do effort and reward that. And we have. Minimum wage in Belgium is quite high. Income inequality is 0,26 gini. Median net wealth is 250k euros.

Motivating people to have kids is also a necessity. To live more together in the same household. To use fewer resources. Be economically sustainable in the long term.

People are scared in Belgium, everyone is retiring. We’ve been accepting a lot of immigrants to help us out with this. Luckily, second generation immigrants are tremendously helpful.

To have a meaningful social net, we do need a good amount of people that can work. That can be parents.

We need to motivate people. And everyone that really cannot help society with this, they are exempted of course.

My friend her parents never worked a day in their lives. It’s absolutely normal. Her dad’s disabled and her mom takes care of him.

But another guy “didn’t work for 10 years cuz his knees hurt” while he randomly showed up at our hospital working, magically, when he’d lose his free passive income. He’s doing a desk job. Like everyone else.

Believe it or not, but I also am a leftist. Social democrat.

I say a lot of bad stuff though. Like: old people that did not have kids, should have less pension and use the money they have been saving up by not having kids.

This is seen as insane, but… old people are the wealthiest class in most societies.

Yes there are exceptions and these people need help. High minimum pension for sure. They need a decent life.

But why would I want someone who didn’t even have a kid to replace themselves as productive entity to gain a fantastic passive income on top of their already passive income generating assets?

a compromise would be something as simple as: retired person above age 65 gets +amount of euros per working child in insert home country.

It would incentivise having kids.

The reaction I get usually is that it’s inhumane, that people are seen as production houses only, that people don’t wanna be born… A lot of doomer stuff to be honest.

It would be fun if there’s a place where you can only deny an idea if you can replace it with your own solution to the issue. In this case “aging population” (popular issue in Belgium right now)

Lemmy is just left wing politics in an echo chamber

This social media seems to be primarily eurozone folks

Both powers have been handling in their own interest.

Biden sending funding to Ukraine has been good for Europe. Trump stopping this funding has been bad for Europe.

Biden wants to keep the American hegemony.

Trump wants to isolate the USA in favour of companies inside the country.

The EU hasn’t been arming themselves because there was no need for it. Not threatening with weapons is being a quite attractive trade partner. The lack of weapons caused Europe to be more stable when cooperating with eachother.

There has been a major history of infighting in Europe. So unifying ourselves after the 2nd world war is a major benefit for us.

Now that we are more unified, we can rearm ourselves properly. With hopefully a European army that defends the whole European union.

Obama/Biden were good for Europe. Trump is bad.

If the next president is good for europe, then so be it.

But the volatility shows that changes must be made. More autonomy, the stability of china is actually looking quite good.

But china shows different issues. That of freedom of expression.

So, we’ll need to rearm, have a bit more hard power. We can’t be the only ones trying without.

Get rid of your military might and then we can do the same. But nah, that’s not going to happen.

Do we see mastodon posts here on Lemmy?

But do it in a smart way. A single person using violence against someone stronger than him, is dumb.

Something like BLM movement is smart.

Just trying to resist arrest, however angry it may make you, is dumb. Unless of course you’d be sent to gulag. Then do resist.

You need to use power in a smart way to gain the upper hand.

We failed to make Russia bend the knee with soft power.

Rearming Europe, after decades of trying without, is necessary because there’s an ongoing war in Europe.

We overestimated our influence without an army, and that’s even with the army of turkey and USA on our side in case we’d get attacked.

Violence is necessary, just unwanted. If someone hits my wife then I’m not going to use my words to solve the situation.

It’s complicated because if you give everyone a gun, then there’s a shooting happening every day. Give nobody a gun, then we don’t know how to defend our countries.

Pros and cons to be outweighed, depending on the larger context.

As if being a horny 5 year old isn’t being a degenerate enough ☺️

Rachel Weisz in the mummy returns. I was a wee lad

I like it quite a bit. Le chat mistral does a good job

We lack a translate button. Rednote and weibo have translate buttons. We need that.

There’s no central authority here. But if it doesn’t matter which instance you are on, then all the users on Lemmy are still just part of Lemmy.

On the graph I see other icons than Lemmy.

Are we able to see content from other social media? Or what is meant with that

I can imagine that spamming/constant harassment/advertising/etc can ruin a space. Especially when it can be automated.

Perhaps it would be better with temp bans and that moderation is automated in order to prevent bias.

It’s been 1 week since I found out about Lemmy, liking it quite a bit.

I wonder, is there an area on this social media that are extremist pro free speech?

Such as, okay you’re being a total shithead, I still won’t ban you.

I’m just curious if spaces such as that even exist, and if they do, what they lead to.

Met my wife on a little internet forum called 9chat. Right before it disappeared.

These little spaces on the internet were quite nice to be. Always seeing the same people. It has a different feeling.

Decentralising social media will have its positives. When one tries to control public opinion, people can flee to another one for example.

Wanpies is a way to say one piece, the anime. Made this name years ago and re-used it here.

It’s been almost a year since I’ve caught up with the manga tho