I think he means there's a difference between births arising from couples in love, as opposed to births arising either by accident or from couples bound by other arrangments forced out of motives of survival, hence the qualifier being a "lover's birth rate."
As for quantifying which births are "lover's" births, and which are not, well... good luck with that.
Birth rate and fertility rate are not the same, so of course I distinguish. Though to be fair I think the correct term is total fertility rate, as sometimes fertility rate is defined as birth rate.
Birth rate (technically, births/population rate) is the total number of live births per 1,000 of a population in a year. It is abysmal in Japan because the population is very old, so not many people are in age of making children.
Total fertility rate represents the number of children that would be born to a woman if she were to live to the end of her childbearing years and bear children in accordance with current age-specific fertility rates. This rate is going up as Japan is slowly making it easier for couples to have children: more day-care facilities, and most importantly Japanese society is (slowly) becoming more tolerant to mothers going back to work.
> and most importantly Japanese society is (slowly) becoming more tolerant to mothers going back to work.
Yup, but that won't prevent Japan from going right into the demography wall within a decade or two (with serious consequences on its economy, since current workers have to pay for retired ones, in a growing deficit and a climate of increasing taxes).
The debt of Japan is so huge (to put it in relative terms, Greece's debt is nothing compared to it) that they would need half of the developed world to cater to it.
Not really. In the end Japanese will have to pay, in one way or another, and that will be either with huge taxation, or dramatic inflation. Or Default. No good options out there, really.
The Japanese can themselves decide which option to take, rather than being forced into one from the outside. The current elected government seems to have taken the route of inflating away the debt.
> The current elected government seems to have taken the route of inflating away the debt.
Yeah, and it's not a pretty way to go with solving the debt problem. This will result in higher prices for everyone, destroying savings and hurting in result the private sector. "Just" to save the government.
It is not to save the government, it is to save the money from the people who own the government bonds, who are mainly Japanese. It is a redistribution issue.
Whenever I see a wasp or a bee or a hornet, I present it with my arm and pray that it will grace me with it's sting, and summon its siblings to join in.
What a privilege it is to be subjugated by nature's sentient, motile organisms! My only regret is that these magnificant creatures don't sting me more often, but alas, it is the right of any autonomous insect to do whatever it wishes with it's sting, and who am I, but a lowly mammal, to coerce its gifts?
Waiting for artificial intelligence to surpass humanity, particularly as if it were a desirable inevitability, and then letting it happen sounds precisely like pain and inaction to me.
Pick bananas. He trudges through black compost in
to the hothouse. He feels he's about to shit. The
missile, sixty miles high, must be coming up on
the peak of its trajectory by now...
beginning its fall...
now...
God, that was the least informative research project I've ever encountered. The premise of the research is something akin to:
Based on recent news reports, where a whistleblower
revealed that tobacco farmers routinely fertilize
their crops with human brains, which then inadvertantly
leads to contamination of tobacco products, leaving all
smokers at risk of developing human prion related diseases,
we've conducted a study to see if this increased the
frequency of hits on the Phillip Morris website's
ingredients page. Our findings show that numbers only
increased by 0.00001%.
Gee, thanks.
Nevermind questioning why anyone would look at the list of public ingredients, when the problem is contamination, which, by definition, means that unintended ingredients ruined the desired product.
Why would a company list an accidental poison as part of its normal product?
Why would Microsoft's privacy policy reveal any useful information about secret government programs?
At no point in time have I ever met anyone who would have imagined that Microsoft's privacy policy would protect them from the NSA.
It's almost like someone decided to study the things people DON'T do, after learning of some significant revelation.
Like, hey let's conduct a study of how many people prefer to watch Family Feud over Price Is Right after being in a car accident! Oh, interesting! The difference is barely measurable!
