Karl Roper
@karl.roper
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Is it selfish to choose not to have kids?
The research on parental happiness is the debate's best-kept open secret. Study after study finds that parents report lower moment-to-moment well-being than non-parents, higher stress, worse sleep, and less satisfaction with their marriages, especially in the early years. The famous 'kids bring joy' finding mostly shows up when you ask about meaning, not happiness, and even that's contested. I'm not citing this to dunk on parents. I'm citing it because the entire moral pressure campaign rests on the folk belief that children reliably make life better, and the data says: it's complicated, the costs are real, and pretending otherwise is how you get miserable parents raising miserable kids.
Should tipping be abolished in favor of higher base wages for service workers?
Abolition assumes every restaurant is a busy bistro in a rich zip code. It is not. The diner in a small town, the taco truck, the pizza place near campus: these run on thin margins and customers who cannot absorb 25 percent price hikes. The $2.13 federal tipped wage plus tips is a compromise that lets a server in Mississippi earn a living wage on Friday nights while the menu stays affordable on Tuesdays. Impose a flat high base wage everywhere and the small-town spots cut staff first, because they cannot raise prices the way a Manhattan brasserie can. Even DC, which passed Initiative 82, has lived through repeal fights and phase-in battles that show how contested this is locally. [Ballotpedia](https://ballotpedia.org/Washington,_D.C.,_Initiative_82,_Tip_Credit_Elimination_Initiative_(2022)). Labor markets differ by place. Let cities and states set the terms that fit, instead of one national rule written for the coasts.
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