I mean, rockets kill about 3 people per year in Israel. I wouldn't overestimate its effect.
Comparatively about 400-500 die in traffic, similar for suicide, about 150-200 from homicide by their fellow countrymen, 1500 from falling, 10 thousand from heartattacks, same for cancer.
I think Israel is uniquely in a very strong nation building phase, culturally. It has a settler and colonist mentality, to bring people and expand. It has had a very high migration percentage throughout its history. Its population has about tenfolded in the past 50 years, not just due to birth. Most of its secular population is also largely in favour of building and expanding Israel as a jewish state, not in a theocratic sense but in a civic/nationality sense. Many Israelis see having children as a form of national continuity in a way that crosses secular-religious lines.
There might be a confounder though, with the causality working backwards.
Rural housing is way cheaper than urban housing.
Urban cultural offering is way more lively than rural cultural offering.
If you want kids you need space, and have no time for fun, so you optimize. You stop paying for cultural offering you don't need, and opt for cheaping housing you do need.
Doesn't mean that urban/rural life makes you have children, rather the opposite. The choice in having children dictates whether you choose rural or urban life.
Not saying it's like this, just offering an alternative theory.
From my observations, its more the friends that never left rural village we grew up in that have children. My urban friends don't really have children maybe because urban life i stressed but you also have so much stuff to do so maybe kids isn't really a thing one think about, it's more about building up a network.
In most countries it's 80% if your household salary is such to support it + household expenses, and approaching 0% if it's not.
And it's intense just for the first few youngest years, when the ratio of daycare employee : baby is 1:2 to 1:4. That doesn't last more than a few years, in which most parents/grandparents want to spend a lot of time with the baby anyway, and less at work.
But from age 4-18 school takes care of the vast majority of daycare hours while you're at work. Even after-school programs become cheap, a group of fifteen 12 year olds can be managed by one daycare employee.
Europe's fifteen minute cities also help, I was going home from school/activities by myself from a young age, because the whole town is walkable/bikeable easily and safely.
Agreed. By just about every measure, we're much better off than the past, yet have fewer kids. Statistics have supported this correlation (richer -> fewer kids) for a century, across the board around the worldwide, yet people often still get the causality exactly backwards: it's too expensive to have kids.
Real median incomes have risen, decade after decade.
And because of this, consumption in key categories has improved. For example:
Housing floor space per person, same trend.
Life expectancy, same trend.
Leisure has increased.
Tourism has increased.
Yet the common discussion is that it is unaffordable or impossible to have kids. It's backwards. My grandparents were dirt poor and each came from families with 8-10 people. I'm comparatively very rich and have no kids. The explanation that it's so unaffordable I think is mostly wrong. It's that not having kids for many people is a better deal than before.
The cost of kids isn't unaffordable per se, but rather opportunity cost is too high.
As an example I just came back from travelling the world for six months. I'm rich enough to do that. Which also means the opportunity cost is so great, that it's a lot to sacrifice to have kids. My grandparents had none of that opportunity cost precisely because they weren't rich.
Yup. We also overestimate how much range we need. Average American driver drives 60km a day. The average Tesla has >500km range, meaning you need to charge fewer than once every 8 days.
Rural tends to mean space, and space tends to mean you can charge your car at home (that's different for a New York apartment dweller), making a once-in-8-day charge absolutely trivial.
In terms of economics, electric fueling of your car wins per mile.
And rural homes tend to have easy access to home-solar (again, good luck installing solar in a New York apartment rental). Electric cars tie into solar really nicely with a basic smart system, as it lets you charge at off-peak rates at night, or dump excess solar during the day into your car.
And what you've said before, it creates energy-independence, great when remote. Not to mention modern EVs allow bi-directional use of the battery, meaning the car can power your home essentials during an outage.
Tesla with lowest range has 430km, highest range 650. Let's average it to 500km.
The average American driver drives 60km per day. In other words you need to charge less than every 8 days.
You can charge to 80% in about 20-30 minutes.
In other words if you find yourself near a charge (easy) for 20-30 minutes a week (easy), then on average there is no range issue.
You're either in a rural area in a single-family home with home charging, or in low-density urban area with single family home charging, or in a dense urban area with lots of public charging. Very few sit outside these three categories that don't enable them home charging or 20-30 minutes a week public charging.
And that's only going one direction. The number of fastchargers 10x'd in ten years, the range of the model S grew by 50% in the last 15 years, the charging speeds roughly tripled. Sufficient charging infrastructure seems like a solved problem, resolving it is a matter of a mere operational roll-out everywhere rather than a political/technical/economical challenge, a matter of when, not if, and a matter of increasingly smaller pockets of the country that are yet to be fully connected. (whether it's 1% or some other small percentage, range shouldn't be a driving factor for tesla sales anymore).
Heatpumps are a proven technology, have been in use for more than a hundred years, and are one of the most efficient (and thereby cost-effective) ways to manage heat.
They're also technically simpler and have fewer components that can wear out. And they're a single system that works both for cooling and heating, rather than needing multiple system investments.
The majority of experts believe that its the future technology stack to manage heat, not a gimmick at all.
That having been said, always start with good insulation first.
Comparatively about 400-500 die in traffic, similar for suicide, about 150-200 from homicide by their fellow countrymen, 1500 from falling, 10 thousand from heartattacks, same for cancer.
I think Israel is uniquely in a very strong nation building phase, culturally. It has a settler and colonist mentality, to bring people and expand. It has had a very high migration percentage throughout its history. Its population has about tenfolded in the past 50 years, not just due to birth. Most of its secular population is also largely in favour of building and expanding Israel as a jewish state, not in a theocratic sense but in a civic/nationality sense. Many Israelis see having children as a form of national continuity in a way that crosses secular-religious lines.
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