You read more into my comments than you should have. I'll expand on my points:

    1) OSHA - I'm delighted and proud that we have OSHA! OSHA regulations have saved lives and prevented serious accidents/sicknesses and continue to do so. Does Vietnam, China, India, etc. have comparable regulations? I don't know the answer to this question, but my guess is largely 'no'. There is a cost associated with OSHA compliance and it's worth it. Is it ok that a factory worker is killed or maimed in some other country for your low prices?
    2) Decline of shop classes - I don't know why they're not as prevalent as they used to be. To be honest, a shop class of 2025 should not look the same as a shop class of 1970. In my opinion, a modern shop/industrial class would include robotics, 3D printing, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), etc. I honestly don't see how anyone would consider this to be a bad thing.
    3) Litigious society - I'm not passing judgement, just calling it like I see it. Many lawsuits are deserved and many likely result in better processes and procedures. I don't have an axe to grind, just stating that the US probably has more lawsuits and judgements than most other countries.
    4) Drug addictions - I don't think that drug addictions are good for anyone. I know that this is a very complicated topic. I'm just pointing out that it may be more difficult to hire manufacturing workers in the US who don't use illegal drugs than in other countries.
    5) Fat, dumb, and happy society - I'm just calling it as I see it. A huge part is because as a country we don't eat healthy enough and get enough exercise. Look at the skyrocketing cases of diabetes. It's a huge problem. Dumb because it seems we continue watering down our schools to make it easier for kids to get through.

If you read everything I wrote above, please tell me where I'm right-wing or left-wing. Of the 5 factors I listed, the only one that I would advocate for a policy change is (2). I would like to see broad funding for shop/industrial classes in high schools throughout the country. Again, these shops would not look like they did in 1970, although they would likely still have some of the same tools. However, they would also have modernized, high-tech ones like robotics, 3D printing, etc.

Where am I so off-base? Where did I make value judgements (aside from fat, dumb, lazy one) about Americans? Am I promoting some right-wing agenda with my comments? I believe that these are honest points that should be discussed and debated.

T&N has such a great product but it was one of those things that failed because the innovation/disruption had no market.

I personally believe that the Japanese futon mat is the healthiest way to sleep, and after you get used to it even extra-firm mattresses are soupy and uncomfortable. Downside though is that it is very difficult to be comfortable on if you are significantly overweight, and it’s a pretty hard sell for couples unless they are both bought into the idea beforehand.

From my personal experience of sleeping on one for the last decade, not having a bed with a mattress on it is beyond the pale. I have a nice townhome that is well decorated. But when people see my bed, they assume I have a health issue, some kind of homelessness trauma, I’m a weeb (definitely not), or that I’m too poor to own a bed. They assume that they could never be comfortable on it, as a pillowy mattress on a high frame is associated in people’s minds with high luxury, angels with harps, royalty, and sexual intrigue. Sleeping on a mat on the floor is associated with camping, homelessness, destitution, and failure.

To each their own I guess

I live in Philadelphia. We had a lot of manufacturing here, but most of that vacated the city center in the 1970s and 1980s. I recently was doing some research into urban renewal around my neighborhood, and found a paper about the city's efforts to address a concentrated population of perpetually drunk homeless men, mostly centered in my neighborhood, mostly squatting in abandoned buildings or living in flophouses. The city's approach was effectively to remove them and spread them out - and bulldoze the neighborhood to make way for a federally funded highway, now I-95. A lot of manufacturing businesses just called it quits - the owners had made their money on the backs of cheap labor and hadn't really set up any kind of succession plan, but could retire comfortably. Others moved, mostly out of the city, and by the 90s, that labor was moving overseas.

And that's why I don't really foresee that kind of manufacturing coming back here. In order to survive the race-to-the-bottom pricing that the majority of Americans crave, you need a large labor force that will accept some form of sub-par living conditions. But if you can't earn a living wage, you can't afford to participate in the economy in a way that supports the manufacturing, and then you're back to those mid-century slums.

I'm dramatically oversimplifying things, my main point here is, I didn't really put together how much of early 20th century American manufacturing relied on chronically drunk homeless men.

The answer is likely unknowable, but I can think of several factors that tie into the plummeting birth rate:

- While the Freakanomics citation of widespread access to abortion has been debunked as a sole cause, I think it remains credible for at least a contributing factor. Fewer young people born to folks who are too poor/busy/not wanting to raise them is doubtlessly going to reduce the number of young offenders who become the prison system's regular customers their whole lives.

- Beyond just abortion, contraceptives and contraceptive education have gotten much more accessible. For all the endless whining from the right about putting condoms on cucumbers poisoning children's minds with vegetable-based erotica, as it turns out, teens have sex, as they probably have since time immemorial, and if you teach them how to do it safely and don't threaten their safety if they do, they generally will do it safely.

- Additionally, there has been a gradual ramp-up in how badly negative outcomes stack in life, and "messing up" on your path to adulthood carries higher costs than it ever has. Possibly contradicting myself, teens are having less sex than ever, as all broad forms of socializing have decreased apart from social media, which is exploding but doesn't really present opportunities to bone down. Add to it, young people are more monitored than they've ever been. When I was coming up, I had hours alone to myself to do whatever I wanted, largely wherever I wanted as long as I could get there and my parents knew (though they couldn't verify where I was). Now we have a variety of apps for digitally stalking your kids, and that's not even going into the mess of extracurricular activities, after school events, classes, study sessions, sports, etc. that modern kids get. They barely have any unmonitored time anymore.

- Another point: alternative sexuality (or the lack thereof) is more accepted than it's ever been by mainstream society, and anything that isn't man + woman is virtually guaranteed to not create unwanted pregnancy unless something truly interesting happens.

- Lastly, I would cite that even if you have a heterosexual couple who is interested in having kids, that's harder than ever. A ton of folks my age can't even afford a home, let alone one suitable for starting a family. The ones that do start families live either in or uncomfortably close to poverty, and usually in one or another variety of insecurity. The ones that can afford it often choose not to for... I mean there's so many reasons bringing kids into the world right now feels unappealing. It's a ton of work that's saddled onto 2 people in a categorically a-historic way, in an economy where two full time salaries is basically mandatory if you want to have a halfway decent standard of living, and double that for one that includes children. That's not even going into the broader state of the world, how awful the dating market is especially for women, so many reasons and factors.

Any stressed animal population stops reproduction first. I don't see why we'd think people would be any different.

Lack of boredom is also a factor.

Social media and modern games are keeping them occupied.

That might have been a part, but it's more that the idea of self-expression as the prime value in art is mostly a 20th century thing. The falling off of skill, realism, and other similar metrics is also a 20th century thing and largely came from photography and mass manufacturing. There's probably an essay or book out there covering the two intertwining topics, but I can't think of any offhand.

It's also worth noting that artists themselves were more directly competitive. Da Vinci and Michelangelo had a bit of a rivalry, for example:

https://artrkl.com/blogs/news/art-history-feuds-michelangelo...

https://www.historyextra.com/period/renaissance/leonardo-mic...

You can't really imagine this happening between top contemporary artists today. "Gerhard Richter says he's a better painter than Takashi Murakami," is a headline that wouldn't make much sense.

The “art world” is wildly divorced from the tastes of the majority of people in society - one could uncharitably but not inaccurately characterise the modern art world as a means to arrange for low cost materials to be purchased for vast sums in tax advantageous ways.

If we look at an art form where there is a lot of validation by the majority of people, tv and films, we see people “painting the same thing” all the time because that’s what the “zeitgeist” is interested in

500 years ago there were very few books and the west European zeitgeist was mostly the bible anyway.