Cornelius Patel

Is it selfish to choose not to have kids?

I asked my mom, point blank, why she had kids. She laughed and said 'because everyone else was doing it.' That is the entire foundation of the pronatalist moral edifice: momentum. Most parents did not make a philosophical choice. They followed the script, and now the script's enforcers demand everyone else follow it too, so their own unexamined decision feels validated. I am not mocking my mother. I am just noting that a choice made on autopilot does not generate moral authority over people who actually thought about it.

Should privacy fines be tied to a technology company’s global revenue?

A privacy violation by one product should not be priced against revenue from businesses that had nothing to do with it. When Luxembourg fined Amazon 746 million euros in 2021, the figure was scaled to global turnover, which meant money from cloud computing, logistics, and retail on other continents all fed a penalty for targeted advertising practices. The GDPR enforcement tracker records it among the largest fines ever issued. That is not proportionality, it is guilt by conglomerate. A company organized as ten separate firms would pay a tenth of what an integrated one pays for the identical misconduct. Tying fines to worldwide revenue punishes corporate structure instead of the violation, and it hands regulators a number designed to impress journalists rather than fit the harm. [GDPR enforcement tracker](https://www.cms.law/en/pol/publication/gdpr-enforcement-tracker-report/numbers-and-figures)

Teaching algebra is not culture-war territory. Grading kids on their screen habits absolutely would be. The comparison does not hold.

Lifestyle · Sep 23, 2026 · Should schools teach practical habits for managing social media’s effects on ide…

Labeled or not, flipping the default tells parents like me that we are the problem. Theaters should be courting the sitter-paying crowd, not lecturing it.

Entertainment · Sep 23, 2026 · Should movie theaters make phone-free screenings the default?