[nelsonic]

There's a reason for the saying: "The Rich get Richer and the Poor get Children". Perversely having children is a "luxury" many people simply cannot afford.

The happiness a "bundle of joy" should bring to the family is often replaced by additional stress of having to work a "better paying" (but often soul-destroying) job to be able to afford the bigger house, school/education, extra curricular activities like sports/music/ballet and eventually college tuition.

Conrad Bastable's well-researched post could easily have concluded that having kids "too early" will bankrupt a family.

The solution/answer is affordable housing. Housing is the single biggest "expense" for all people/families. Which is why it's the problem I want to tackle personally: https://github.com/dwyl/home

The fact that merely giving birth to a child in SF is $15k is mind-boggling. The "Government" needs to fix that or risk population decline catastrophe which will have many knock-on effects!

SF should follow the model from Finland where young parents/mothers are given cash incentives and all FREE healthcare: https://www.kela.fi/web/en/families

[berberous]

Apologies if this unsolicited advice comes off as rude, but consider easing up on the italicizing and "quoting" of random words. It makes your writing style hard to read and waters down the effect when you do each once per paragraph.

[nelsonic]

@berberous, it's good advice and welcome feedback. Thank you.

I just tend to write the way I talk and using punctuation, speech marks and italics/bold is the only way I can think of to convey intonation/meaning. I will try harder to avoid the excessive use of emphasis, as you say it detracts from the writing/reading.

PG almost never uses any sort of emphasis in his essays: http://paulgraham.com/articles.html so I'm going to wean myself off it.

I am genuinely grateful for the feedback. =)

[SmallDeadGuy]

I completely agree. To me, 9 formatting changes in a single sentence, e.g. in the second sentence of that GitHub repo readme, is incredibly excessive. While the comment you replied to isn't nearly as extreme, it still has a similar issue of too many formatting changes per paragraph.

[expertentipp]

> The fact that merely giving birth to a child in SF is $15k is mind-boggling. The "Government" needs to fix that or risk population decline catastrophe which will have many knock-on effects!

The fertility and associated problems of local population can be completely ignored by the government of country like US - country with low population density, predictable steady population growth, and always a large group of people around the world willing to immigrate into the country. If not you, it's going to be someone else.