On looks, leagues and other such irritants...

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Oh, I'm so with you on all this! I had my first baby at 35, and though I'm glad I waited, it's still very expensive. I think my point was that it's unfair to penalize women in the workforce because someone, somewhere, sometime has to have and raise the babies. I understand from a business standpoint why your first choice wouldn't be to have an executive leave for such an arbitrary thing as having a baby, but I still think we need to shift the paradigm. Otherwise men continue to get all the responsibility in the work-world, and the glass ceiling remains firmly in place.

My grandmother quit her nursing job after she had kids, it was what was done then. But I know she missed it and her first calling wasn't being a stay-at-home mom. My mom worked full time my entire life; she and my dad joked about leapfrogging each other on the pay/responsibility scales over the years. So, my experience and nostalgia derived therefrom are different from yours, I think.

And your comment on intelligent people having babies gave me a wry chuckle. My favorite part of the movie "Idiocracy" is the first five minutes, where it's explained how cultural pressures bifurcated society in such a way that we bred out our own intellectuals and productive members of society. Have you seen it?

Idiocracy is one of my favorite movies, and actually one of the reasons I decided to finally get on the ball and have a baby.

What is scary is how true it is -- one need only watch a show like "Maury" here in the U.S. to see it in action -- urban idiots cranking out kids by the dozens, with different women (also idiots), while you and I foot the tax bill. What's sad is that so many of these children will end up as criminals or otherwise unproductive, not ready for the 21st century info economy, and doing more harm than good to our economy.

Meanwhile countries like China and India continue to pass us by in areas like Mathematics -- so basically, their children will be outperforming western world children by the time I am in my 60s.

There is some bad genetics out there no doubt, but poverty is a reason why people have a lot of kids the world over. It's like a survival tactic. They also have terrible schools and its not their fault. People talk down on welfare but they forget rich people are the biggest welfare queens there are.

Oh, I don't dispute it -- don't get me started on the corporate/military-industrial complex and how it rapes the taxpayer (and everyone else).

Yes, poverty is a cause, as is ignorance and religion (for those who refuse to use contraception). But there's more to it, at least here in the U.S. I say the following as a true moderate (I'm a Democrat but conservative on certain issues) -- well-meaning people during the 80s and 90s actually did more harm than good to our urban poor by not holding them to a higher standard. Instead, they decided that the culture of poverty was "their culture" (when nothing could be father from the truth) and that we should all respect it and celebrate it (the corporate entertainment industry had big stakes in this as well). This was condescending and insulting, but the urban masses embraced this and took it as carte blanche to continue things like unmarried childbearing, lack of interest in education, and living off of the public dole (because they "deserved" it). So really, condescension by the middle and upper-middle class made the problem worse.

One stat I can throw at you right now, as an example -- African-Americans had something like a 20% illegitimacy rate in the 1920s (very close to the rest of the population), but this has now ballooned to 80%. Mere poverty didn't cause this -- obviously that community has more money now than then, during what was one of the worst periods for that ethnic group post-Civil War. There were other political factors, but clearly this community is not living up to the dream of Dr. King in the 1960s -- they let themselves down, and we did as well by letting them and even encouraging them.

The other thing to look at -- incentives, which are what drive most of us to do what we do. Until the mid-90s, the welfare system incentivized poor urban mothers to have children -- each additional child was a bonus to the check. We also didn't kick people off of the rolls until the 90s, regardless of whether they tried to find another job or not. So while we basically rewarded one group for spitting out children left and right, we did not similarly subsidize the middle class to do the same. So effectively we are creating an artificial environment where one set of genes, including the criminally-prone, chronically unemployed, and drug addicts, is able to out reproduce the actual tax-paying side. And look how fast it can happen -- I'm 34, and If I were a poor urban man, I might actually be a grandfather by now -- I'm barely a father as it is (just had a baby recently). Multiply that over a hundred years, and the numbers start working against us.

Clearly Maury is not strapped for fathers with multiple children by different mothers, or women who want to blame their baby on multiple men (sometimes as many as 20 at a time, on the early Maury shows of that type) -- it's a scary situation, and makes idiocracy not so unlikely. Meanwhile birthrates are falling in most first-world nations, except the U.S.

If your survival is threatened, the LAST thing you would do is choose to spend time and precious resources on a child,

let alone having MANY for that purpose, thereby lessening each one's chance of survival.

I don't see how having kids reduced poverty. It makes it worse. Yet another mouth that cant be fed.

How about the perception that though you are poor, having several children ensures that after they grow up, they will look after you in old age. One may underestimate the difficulties involved in raising children, but the perception is there even if it is on shaky grounds.

Honestly I don't believe in leagues anymore, leagues are something that is made up by teenagers. Most of my friends still believe in it but I don't. After seeing so many ugly men get hot women, it's obvious to me how everything works, after all, in life everything is possible.

Remember that you are talking about one kind of league, that of looks. Teens gravitate towards lookism in their social tiering because as a teenager, you really don't have any assets. Your parents might, and you might have some good toys, but you don't have a real income, nor a real need to consider that.

Rest assured that as adults, we definitely make divisions according to class, education, earnings, and occupation. Some hybrid of these determines who we think is our social or romantic "equal" vs. other people. And yes, we all still do value looks to some extent -- it's just that this variable isn't necessarily the dominant one when making that decision.

I disagree. When you're a teenager, there is an asset that can make or break your chances in dating (except in New York and centers other major cities). That asset is a car. In my high school, having a car was a strict prerequisite to having a girlfriend. It wasn't written anywhere, but it was a given. If you didn't have a car (and you were a guy), dating was pretty much out of the question for you. On the plus side, it didn't matter if your car was a clunker you bought off a junkyard for $400, but you absolutely had to have a car. Sadly, I had no money at the time, and my family was too poor to buy even that (not that I expected it, but still), but it probably wouldn't make a difference, given my virtually nonexistent dating skills at the time.

Yes, you are right -- a car is pretty key, and you are right, even at a snobby school (which I went to), even having a clunker is better than no car at all. I stand corrected on that, but I stand by the rest of my statement.

Yeah, that robot was really cute, I wonder who built it.

I miss you, my toy.

This thread was made 2 days after my dad died.

Anyway, you'll know how good looking you are just from how others treat you. If you're like me and your appearance gets laughed at or you get told you're ugly repeatedly, every day since you became old enough to walk, then you're either ugly or just unlucky. THAT is how you know.

It is generally a bad idea these days for guys (not so sure about girls) to try to date out of their looks range, or their league, because they'll just get slapped with all sorts of labels or, in some cases, even lawsuits. I wish I was kidding or exaggerating. Unfortunately, I've experienced every kind of rejection except for being threatened with lawsuits.