ciphol

The areas where the counter-reformation (i.e. theocracy) was strongest had the most secular populations. Do you call that religion or not-religion?

Why would the climate/weather changes stop right at the French border?

Modernization drew a lot of people away from traditional religion. But Hasidim and the Amish etc are "post modern". They have developed various cultural features to "immunize" themselves against the temptations of modernity. There is no reason for this to start failing at any particular point, except perhaps when they become too much of an imposition on the rest of society, which pushes back on them.

> how can he pin down the demographic decline as caused by the Catholic Church’s decline ?

He gives several data points for secularization, such as the language people chose to use in their wills. Since there is a strong general correlation between low fertility and low religion, it seems likely that these are causally linked in 18th century France, rather than coincidentally happening at the same time.

It's a harder question why France in particular secularized at this time. The argument he very tentatively proposes is that freedom from religious coercion leads people to tend to become more religious (as can be seen by comparing the US to Europe over the last few centuries) and that France, due to its strong counter-reformation, had an unusually high level of religious coercion.

> Why wouldn’t it the other way round, with the core causes of the French decline also triggering less religiousness ?

What do you mean by "French decline"? Its loss of status as a superpower starting in 1815? That postdates the decline in religiousness.

Presumably a pharaoh who ruled for decades would indeed have lots of kids, if he wanted to and (as most are) was physically able.

The capacity of airships is miniscule compared to transatlantic shipping. The article suggests a 450m long airship carrying approximately 800 tons. For contrast, a single container ship is about the same size as that airship, but can carry 230,000 tons. Why would you replace your current system with a new system having 300 times less capacity? A brief estimate suggests that the container ship only uses 100 times as much fuel, so it's roughly 3 times as efficient as airships to boot.

There aren't many such children, and it's complicated to get them in an ethical way.

USSR was poor, we're talking about rich countries.

That's exactly what I said - "if something other than money is contributed".

But not every man (or woman) does these things, and likely their spouse will be doing them as well. If I do half the child care and chores, while my wife does half the child care and chores AND earns all the money, how much is she going to like the arrangement?

Imagine you get home, plug your car in, the car runs your home heating for the remainder of the evening for free, then you go to sleep and the car recharges for cheap. Sounds like an attractive proposal?

Charging at work seems like the thing to do. Not only is there excess solar energy at that time, but workplaces are more concentrated than homes so the installation costs for chargers should be less.

If you're no longer going to be contributing income, what will you contribute instead to the family? Nobody respects or appreciates a freeloader as a partner. But if something other than money is contributed, it's more likely to work.

You can't become a sovereign entity without territory on which you can enforce your norms. Amazon doesn't and (for the foreseeable future) won't have sovereign territory.

Actually, the biggest roadblock is ChatGPT's hallucinations which mean that any answer it gives to a complex question is highly likely to be completely wrong.

> Haha... Seriously? This is the narrative that was pushed indeed. Now it turns out that many people ravaged their health with these untested mRNA treatments. Search for myocarditis (even my GP now knows about this).

Conspiracy theories much? Myocarditis is extremely rare after mRNA vaccine. Since it's much more common after covid infection, and mRNA vaccines have a significant (though not perfect) preventative effect against infection, these vaccines have significantly decreased the incidence of myocarditis, not increased it. And mRNA vaccines weren't "untested" in 2020 - they'd been under development for nearly 50 years at that point, and the covid ones had been through a series of clinical trials (aka "tests") before becoming available to the public.