That math does not match my math with my kids. Does that factor in the price of water and electricity and detergent? And are you comparing to store brand diapers or the luxury name brand ones? The price difference is literally 5x for some sizes.
I did the math meticulously when I had my first kid years ago, comparing store brand diapers vs cloth. Once you factor in the up front cost of the cloth diapers plus the cost of water and energy and detergent running the wash, the costs are virtually identical. The math looks better for cloth if you use them for years or multiple kids, but that's not super hygienic.
That's not even factoring in time and convenience.
I am convinced cloth diapers are some kind of performative environmentalialsm or performative motherhood akin to the trad wife phenomenon.
Did you calculate based on buying cloth nappies second hand and then reselling them? That was a great alternative for my family. Worked out to something like $100 in total nappy costs for one child, including the opportunity cost of tying up the capital up front. That's less than $1 per week. Make it $1.5 if we include electricity and water costs of laundry, compounded over that period.
I would struggle to find single-use nappies for $1.5 per week in my area.
I guess if you buy them used the math changes. Second hand diapers was a line in the sand for my wife.
But these people talking about diaper washing services, at that point, surely what is the point? I guess the thought of diapers in a landfill keeps some folks up at night.
What do you find confusing about the idea of a diaper service? It seems too unsanitary for you? The idea that it might cost slightly more than disposable diapers is intolerable to you?
Do you have any reason to believe washing diapers actually is unsanitary?
The price tag and environmental impact of constant diaper delivery seems off the cuff like it would negate the original benefit of cloth diapers. Admittedly I have not done math on this one.
With the service we used, they picked up and dropped off diapers once per week using a big truck. They also drove around to do the same for many other people at the same time. You can't call this diaper delivery "constant". And if the emissions from this are significant, you could always use an electric van.
How are you feeling: do you still think this is something only for performative environmentalists or "trad wives"? Neither of these descriptions apply in even the remotest sense to my wife or I.
You're willing to wash and re-use for one kid but not then to let the next one re-use? So does that mean the wash doesn't get the diaper clean? And if that's true, why re-use them at all for anyone?
It's more about the accumulation of fecal matter over time. I don't feel convinced that a washer removes it all, hence staining. And I don't feel great about making my kid sit in another kid's shit.
There are many decisions young parents make that from the remove of a keyboard in a happily single or child-free relationship seem irrational or (mon dieu!) _inefficient_, but there is a emotional depth to these choices that are _very_ meaningful to the people involved.
As a fun thought experiment, when people complain about LLMs, I substitute the word "human" or "employee" into the sentence and see if it is equally true.
"You can never really trust an LLM!" -> "You can never really trust an employee!" (Every IT department ever.)
"LLMs make shit up." -> "Humans make shit up." (Wow very profound insight.)
While that will always be true, LLMs do it a lot more often and do so with confidence and poise. We have evolved ways to tell if someone is making shit up (which usually works); LLMs subvert this. We are also being sold the idea that these LLMs are some kind of super intelligence which isn't helping matters.
Maybe the real maker economy will be the future underclass building makeshift infrastructure to support a subsistence lifestyle in small post capital communities off the grid once big capital no longer feels the need to maintain a consumer economy at any scale.
I don't know what the future holds, but owning a few acres in rural nowhere and knowing how to build stuff gives me a sense of security.
Someone needs to find a way to turn dirt into a 3d printing material.
This is like travel agents crying that websites like TripAdvisor destroyed tourism. Not exactly an impartial party, so it's hard to take them seriously even if the point makes sense.
"I used to keep this gate, and now it's all ruined!"
"Paying a guy from the Philippines to write your code and submit it under your name is just another tool no different than using an IDE!"
Surely we agree that some boundary exists where it becomes absurd right? We are just quibbling over where to draw the line. I personally draw it at AI.
I find the Nicene Creed to be a major stumbling block as a person of Christian faith with a background in formal philosophy. Rather than accepting the inherent paradoxes in Christ's message, it attempts to shoehorn it together using the philosophical swiss army knife of the era, Neoplatonism.
As a result, now Christian orthodoxy is saddled with neoplatonic philosophical vestigial baggage in the term "consubstantial", which means Christians are wedded to and forced to defend a hard metaphysical realism. This comes out hard in Augustine and later medieval Christians. (See Anselm, Aquinas, etc)
They described the faith using the intellectual tools of their era, and now those artifacts are hard-coded into the faith. It would be like if the Nicene fathers were in the early 20th century and described the faith in terms of Theosophy and branded all non Theosophists heretics forever.
> Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves (cf. Ex 33:18; Ps 27:8-9; 63:2-3; Jn 14:8; 1 Jn 3:2).
I am not saying I _know_ anything. Rather, I am disappointed in the incredible hubris and overconfidence shown by the Church fathers, not in terms of their faith but in terms of their certainty in the intellectual tools they had available and the extent to which those fumbling tools describe a God who in their own telling is infinite.
Yes I have read large portions of the Summa, Augustine, Anselm, Boethius, Origen, and others, and I am fairly confident in saying that if you strip away the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle and their followers, many of the arguments laid out by the patristics become tautologies at best and semantically meaningless at worst.
I am not saying I know what the answers are. Just that we need more humility than what was shown by a church council convened by--checks notes-- a power hungry and opportunistic Roman dictator.
Good idea! I haven't and won't. Now read me the original text of Anselm's ontological argument and explain it in modern English without falling back to ancient philosophical gibberish like "substance" and "potentiality".
> Further, in your "formal philosophy" studies, how much of logic and proofs did you study?
Logic and proof only get you so far — IIRC, lots of math-based cosmological conjectures don't survive confrontation with observations from the real world. Cf. my favorite proof-texts:
- Rom. 1.20: "For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse." (Emphasis mine.)
- 1 Thess. 5:21: "Test all things; hold fast to that which is good."
- Deut. 18:22: "If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously, so do not be alarmed."
