In my previous post, I suggested that there was an inverse correlation between intelligence and wealth. Look! I got another data point!
i don’t know who needs to hear this but having children is *literally* free
can we please stop with the “kids are expensive” nonsense?
your lifestyle is expensive, not children
Elon Musk: Exactly
Speaking as a parent, we basically drained our life savings to raise three kids. And that was with public schools and a lower class lifestyle.
Speaking as a biologist, there’s a vast literature on energy budgets and the cost of reproduction.
Children have never been free. Maybe they seem free to billionaires for whom the expenditures on food and nannies and private schools and so forth are a tiny fraction of their ill-gotten wealth, but they really aren’t.
Maybe really rich people think their kept women pop out larvae that scuttle off into the woodwork to forage on pigeons and rodents, only to emerge years later with a magical trust fund, but that doesn’t work for the rest of us.
“Giving birth costs $18,865 on average, including pregnancy, delivery and postpartum care, according to the Peterson-Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) Health System Tracker.”
It’s very sweet of Vittorio to encourage parents not think of their children in dollars-and-cent. I don’t think of my son in cost accounting terms. However, I’m guess Vittorio hasn’t seen the hospital and doctor bills for being in labor in the hospital for 48 hours with an emergency C-section at the end. Obviously she doesn’t know about all the other costs of raising a child, particularly one who had neurological issues in a society that values fetuses but throws actual children under the bus.
Elon is just a jerk. I would rather be near a bear in the woods than near Elon anywhere.
@2:
I note that given two locations and three entities, there are a total of eight possible arrangements, of which you appear to have only considered 2, possibly 3.
Cthulhu, that is cosmically stupid and obviously as wrong as possible.
.1. Just adding up the costs of pregnancy and childbirth without considering the monetary costs, they are still very expensive.
Pregnancy costs around 30,000 extra kilocalories total. In our society, the extra food isn’t that hard to get but it isn’t free either.
Pregnancy also takes a huge toll on a woman’s body and health. You won’t be the same afterwards.
You may end up with permanent injuries of one sort or another or if it really goes wrong, you will end up dead.
Before modern medicine, it wasn’t unusual for a man to have 2 or 3 wives. Because women often died due to childbirth.
.2.
Those free kids aren’t free.
The average cost of a middle class child through age 18 today is $306, 924.
You could add another few hundred thousand for college.
I’m happily childfree!
Vittorio’s handle is Iter Intellectus, “the path of understanding”. Someone appears to have tied his shoelaces together just as he set out on the path.
This Vittorio has an excuse at least.
She is obviously very stupid and/or completely out of touch with reality.
.1 Has Elon Musk every actually said anything intelligent?
I’ve seen a lot of his comments in passing and they are invariably very stupid, often just weird, and often just malevolent and reprehensible.
He is after all at least a Nazi adjacent right wingnut.
.2. Has Elon Musk ever actually exhibited any sort of benign humanity?
I’ve never seen anything but a not very bright guy who hates most humans.
Even his oldest kid is estranged and had nothing good to say about Elon Musk.
These are rhetorical questions but if anyone has an answer, surprise us.
The other cost of those free kids is something Vittorio and Elon Musk are incapable of understanding.
They may know that there are 8 billion other people on the earth, but those people aren’t real and don’t matter to them. They are just abstractions to people lacking any sort of empathy or social awareness.
Those kids become adults and they are putting a lot of stress on our planet right now. One kid might not be noticeable but 8 billion kids certainly are.
We collectively are costing the earth a lot.
Global warming, mass extinctions, pollution, and resource wars aren’t free either.
Getting pregnant is usually free. Everything else costs.
Tried to find that tweet so I could have a laugh at Elmo’s dumb ass, but I found one of his masturbatory “Cybertruck iz awesum!!” tweets and pointed out that they are all being recalled.
Think he’ll suspend my Xitter account…? 🤣
The other cost of a pregnancy is something few people have bothered to consider.
It takes almost a year out of your life.
It is work. Usually unpaid work at that.
These days you can do what Elon Musk did, and hire people to be pregnant with your future children. This is paid work.
The going rate for a surrogate pregnancy carrier is $100,000 to $200,000 per pregnancy.
There is nothing free about the time and effort people put into being pregnant.
We are lucky that a lot of people think the cost in time, money, effort, and health is…worth it.
I saw a car yesterday with a “Expensive financial burden on board” instead of “Baby on board”.
Elon is not a father, except in genetics sense. His degree of fatherness is exactly like the dude who walks into a clinic to jerk off in a cup and then walks away. In fact, I bet very few of these rich men are fathers in any real sense of the word.
i don’t know who needs to hear this but having children is literally free
If that were ever true, then NO ONE would need to hear it, on any social media, from anyone.
Maybe we could propose an addendum to the various handbooks of diseases:
– Billionaire’s Disease
Class: brain-rotting malady
Vector: money in excessive quantities
Symptoms: the sufferers become convinced that whatever old crap they spout must be absolutely correct, because they are very very rich, so there.
PZ should hurry and publish, I smell a Nobel here…
What does that weird “your lifestyle is expensive” comment mean?
I feel like he probably thinks that’s an “out”. Like maybe he’d be ready to concede that a hospital birth is X tens of thousands of dollars if called out on that, but getting medical care for a birth is just like, a lifestyle choice man. You could deliver the baby in the spare bedroom. Ditto food, clothes, education for the child.
And yeah, in a very limited sense, I suppose it’s theoretically possible to have a baby with no real monetary cost. People in, say, uncontacted Amazonian settlements must do that all the time. But it’s Kola borehole levels of stupid on any other level, no different from pretending that people can just opt out of society (or the monetary system) by living in the woods. There are legal and social reasons it’s not actually possible to do that, and common sense reasons you shouldn’t even if you could. The high monetary cost (for things like proper nutrition and health care) is there precisely to (partially) mitigate the astronomical non-monetary costs of pregnancy and childbirth (like all the health risks mentioned up thread).
Um, 18 years worth of food? Hardly see how Vittorio and Elmo could miss that.
(And teenagers eat like horses.)
If men like Elon had to give birth to their own kids, there’d be a LOT more investment in artificial womb technology then there currently is. Bearing children is hard.
jack lecou @16:
I believe it means the same thing as the “Millenials could afford houses if they stopped wasting all their money on avocado toast.” Namely, that he’s talking out of his ass.
No children aren’t free and the children of the obscenely wealthy are definitely not free. They are a burden of everyday low and middle income earners whose taxes fund the generous government grants that provide the carpet on the classroom floors and the air-con in the rooms, not to mention the music labs, computer labs and science labs that cash starved public schools can only dream of. Meanwhile public schools who receive less government funding per student than the wealthiest private schools struggle along trying to provide a basic education with limited resources and underpaid teachers who have to fight against book banners and predatory ideologues who want to impose their version of the truth on vulnerable children.
xohjoh2n: I would rather be close to a bear in the woods than have a bear close to Elon in the woods.
I wish no ill to the bear.
Wait, are we reading this nonsense to be anything but MRAs trying to get out of paying child support?
@21:
What makes you think the bear is at risk?
“There’s a significant overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans.”
If this thread is accurate, the kid with the OP isn’t even out of school, not even done being spent on most likely. Just a measure of how oblivious he is.
https://ifunny.co/picture/vittorio-gj-iterintellectus-i-don-t-know-who-needs-to-gtVkIJhPB
It’s just gibberish.
If you try to unpack it, it means exactly nothing coherent.
.1. Kids are free to you if…you impregnate some girl or woman up and then run away. She is the one paying in time, money, health, and future life success.
She can and often will dump the baby on the foster care system.
The kid still costs society a lot, but it isn’t costing Mr. kids are free anything.
Unless in rare case the cops come after him for child support. It’s uncommon but it happens.
.2. Kids weren’t even free in pre-modern civilizations.
Those extra 30,000 kcals for the pregnancy and 300,000 to breastfeed for two years are going to be scarce and hard to obtain for a lot of people a lot of the time.
Half your kids will die anyway because the child mortality rate ran around 50%.
WIthout modern medicine, women had a high risk of dying of pregnancy and childbirth complications. Women were a scarce and valuable resource back then.
For most of our history as a species, the human population grew extremely slowly and we were at high risk of extinction.
It costs the tribe and community a lot when a breeding age female dies.
Vittorio is just a good example of someone very stupid who managed to learn how to read and write.
This is how cheap and easy it is to have children.
For almost all of our history as a species, population growth was very slow.
This source says it took 11,700 years for the human population to reach 1 billion.
It isn’t quite right though.
The H. sapiens species is roughly 200,000 years old. Population growth was a lot lower than that and it took roughly 199,700 years to reach 1 billion humans.
Modern technology makes having children cheaper but not by much. It is still a major life investment.
Are they outing themselves as serial impregnators who refuse to pay child support?
Obs, the “having children is literally free” refers to the impregnation process by natural means, no more.
Once the pregnancy starts, the costs accrue rapidly — not least, opportunity costs.
And once born, well… ongoing maintenance.
—
BTW: https://anticruelty.org/pet-library/estimated-annual-cost-owning-pet
Musk’s view makes perfect sense from the perspective of a cuckoo or a parasitic wasp.
Musk won’t be so happy with the “lifestyle choices” some people might make as part of having kids. Like putting off buying a new Tesla car and driving their existing car a while longer.
@27. llyris : “Are they outing themselves as serial impregnators who refuse to pay child support?””
Yes? Er, wait, wrong ending. Yes.
Quotes that seem to indicate that rational thought completely eludes these people:
– having children is literally free
– Jewish space lasers
– kill the misbehaving puppy
– windmills kill whales
– always trust your feelings
– there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective
It makes me wonder if the brains of some of these prominent people have been taken over by a defectively coded Artificial Intelligence
‘Free speech absolutist'(ROFLMAO) the elongated muskrat is demanding that anyone who takes down an american flag and puts up a palestinian flag should be deported.
I wish we could deport him and his insanity.
@28: Only $800/year to own a cat? Even allowing US/CAN currency conversion, that’s low-ball. By quite a bit. Trust me, we’ve had a dozen of them over the last 45 years.
Now, let’s see, who should we add to the deportation of deplorables list?
Even if we generously grant that conceiving and giving birth to a child is free (assuming you do it cro-magnon style, with zero medical or other assistance, and everything works out in your favor), vittorio is still being disingenuous, because most people understand that the expression “kids are expensive” is not simply referring to conceiving and giving birth to a child, but also to RAISING that child, which no rational person could argue is free. This is scornful stupidity masquerading as rational intelligence — totally Musk’s thing.
like a lot of pop bs economics and politics it only can look like they have some insight because of the level of prosperity and security we have managed to acquire in the “modern developed world” . It is akin to the how some people have a romantic attachment to libertarianism as some kind of ideal utopian society which is only possible to contemplate in a place that is based on the rule of law and is prosperous and secure.
Always it seems advocated by the most self-centered a**h**** available
Obs, the “having children is literally free” refers to the impregnation process by natural means, no more.
Um, no, “obs,” in standard usage, the phrase “having children” does NOT refer only to “the impregnation process.”
The allusion was to the distinction between having a child and keeping and raising a child, Raging Bee.
Thus, foundlings.
(cf. Hansel and Gretel — they could have them, just could not afford to keep ’em)
—
Even destitute people can have children; sadly, often more than non-poor people.
(Paradoxical?)
If “having children” refers only to getting pregnant, then the original comment is thoroughly irrelevant to any current social discussion. When people say “kids are expensive”, they’re not referring to the expense of having sex and no person who was even slightly in touch with reality could think that they did.
LykeX, fair enough.
But then, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Cline
Whether or not he can be considered as having had children depends on the definition of it.