• The government of Tokyo is launching an app to help its citizens find love — and get married.
• Japan is experiencing record-low birth and marriage rates and the numbers are particularly bad in Tokyo.
• Elon Musk, who has called population decline a greater threat than climate change, tweeted his support for the app.

In February, Japan's government said "unprecedented steps" must be taken to tackle the country's record-low birth rates.

Tokyo's government got the message.

The city has invested $1.28 million in a dating app for its residents, due to be launched this summer.

The app, run by a private contractor, has a rigorous registration process to ensure users are committed to marriage as an end goal.

Japanese national newspaper The Asahi Shimbun reported that the app requests not just a photo ID but also an income certificate and an official document confirming your relationship status.

The outlet said that there are 15 categories of personal data to fill out on the app, including height, education, and occupation — all of which will be visible to potential matches.

After that, users attend a mandatory interview with the app's operators before signing a pledge promising that they are looking for a marriage partner and not just a casual relationship.

"If there are many individuals interested in marriage but unable to find a partner, we want to provide support," a Tokyo official said, according to The Asahi Shimbun.

Officials admitted it was rare for a local government to develop a match-making app, but they said they hoped the officially endorsed app would encourage people reluctant to use mainstream apps.

The government app comes as Japan faces critically low birth and marriage rates.

On Wednesday, data released by Japan's Health Ministry revealed that its birth rate fell 5.6% in 2023 to its lowest level since Japan started recording statistics in 1899. Marriage rates were down 6% compared to 2023.

In Tokyo, the numbers are even worse. The city's fertility rate, the number of children a woman is expected to give birth to during her lifetime, was 0.99 in 2023 — the only prefecture that failed to reach 1.00.

Overall, the country's 125 million-ageing population is projected to fall 30% by 2070, which could have dangerous implications for the country's economy and national security.

Japan's government has put aside $34 billion in the 2024 budget for childcare and parental services.

Elon Musk, who is passionate about fighting population decline, tweeted his support for the app, saying he was "glad the government of Japan recognizes the importance of this matter."

The Tesla CEO has voiced his belief a number of times that globally low birth rates could lead to "population collapse." He has called the issue "a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming."

"If radical action isn't taken, Japan (and many other countries) will disappear!" Musk said in response to the app announcement.

• The diamond industry is in trouble, with declining Chinese demand and the rise of lab-grown options.
• China is the industry's second-largest market, but fewer Chinese are getting married.
• The price of natural diamonds has dropped by 30% from their record high in 2022.

The mined diamond industry is in trouble. In China, the industry's second-largest market, lab-grown varieties, a sluggish luxury market, and low marriage rates are causing it to lose its sparkle.

Duncan Wanblad, the chief executive of Anglo-American, De Beers' largest shareholder, voiced the industry's challenges in an interview with the Financial Times last week.

"It is the one that is real bottom of cycle," he told the outlet, referring to the decline in the price of naturally produced diamonds.

Wanblad said that the company plans to divest its stake in De Beers, the most famous name in diamonds, but added that it would be a challenging and lengthy process.

The Zimnisky Global Rough Diamond Index, which tracks the price change of natural rough diamonds, has shown a steady decline over the past two years.

According to the index, prices have fallen about 6% this year, and have sunk by about 30% from their all-time high in 2022.

In a separate interview with the Financial Times' Chinese edition, De Beers' CEO Al Cook said that although China is the company's most important market, it is also becoming increasingly challenging.

Cook said one issue is a shift in perception of lab-grown diamonds in the country.

Lab-grown diamonds are becoming more popular worldwide, and are cheaper and quicker to produce. The Knot's Real Weddings Study found that nearly half of engagement rings bought in the US last year featured a lab-grown diamond as a center stone.

A social media analysis by Daxue Consulting found that lab-grown diamonds are also gaining traction in China, particularly among cash-strapped younger people.

Even so, De Beers recently announced that it would halt its six-year experiment with selling lab-grown diamond jewelry.

Paul Zimnisky, who runs the Zimnisky index, told Business Insider that he believes the "fad" for synthetic diamonds will start to fade, but in a follow-up email this week, he said that it still impacts supply and, consequently, the price of diamonds.

Zimnisky said another "notable" factor is that the Chinese luxury market has struggled to recover, with demand for diamonds falling far short of the peak levels seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the pandemic, some people spent their money on luxuries like diamonds, since experiential purchases, such as expensive vacations, were mostly unavailable.

Meanwhile, according to Daxue Consulting, a decline in China's marriage rate, which hit a record low in 2022 before rebounding last year, means fewer people have bought wedding and engagement rings.

Broader economic uncertainty in China is also a factor, according to Zimnisky, who said consumers may be choosing gold over diamonds as an investment, since the value of gold has been more stable recently.

However, he told BI that the diamond industry's fate is not set in stone.

"Of course, there will be ups and downs," he said.

My first exposure to gentle parenting ended in projectile vomiting.

It was 2007, the summer after my junior year of college, and a new babysitting client was walking me through the dinner and bedtime routines for her two young children. As we ascended the staircase to an expansive second floor, the younger of the pair — a placid 16-month-old propped on his mother's hip — locked my gaze and jabbed his index finger into the side of his other hand.

"That's baby sign language for 'more,'" his mother explained, acknowledging that her toddler hadn't mastered the proper mechanics. I should oblige him anyway, she told me. Babies know what they need even if they can't yet articulate those needs through speech, she said. It was important to honor their choices.

The toddler had just finished eating half a banana. As instructed, I retreated to the kitchen and returned with the other half. He devoured it quickly and repeated the gesture. I returned with another half banana. He gestured again; again, I delivered. Then again. And again. Until it was too much.

Partially digested bananas sprayed everywhere, much to the surprise of his mother. "Oh, my God!" she wailed as she tried, in vain, to contain the gloopy stream with her free hand. "How many bananas did you just give my baby?" she hissed, regurgitated fruit oozing through her fingers. She had watched me feed her baby but hadn't clocked just how many times her son had requested another banana.

I was young, broke, and beholden, which meant I had to swallow my pride. "He — he kept saying 'more,'" I sputtered.

She employed me for nearly a year. And she was far from the only client who began to emphasize their children's preferences.

As an in-demand babysitter for the property-owning intelligentsia of Toronto, I witnessed this gentle-parenting takeover up close. Flimsy collapsible strollers were replaced with unwieldy stretch-cotton contraptions that strapped infants to parents' bodies and ensured tuned-in and responsive caregivers. Children old enough to unclasp a nursing bra were encouraged to put those fine motor skills to use until they decided they were ready to chew solid foods. Baby sign language progressed from a type-A-parent novelty to the standard operating procedure. Most striking of all, multiple clients barred me from issuing a firm "no" in the presence of their preschoolers, let alone to them — it was a soft "no, thank you," or bust.

Parents are realizing that the time- and energy-intensive method is producing decidedly ambiguous outcomes.

Seventeen years later, gentle parenting is now the default among my professional-class millennial peers. Less a rigid doctrine than a guiding set of ideals, the approach has assumed an assortment of labels — intentional parenting, mindful parenting, respectful parenting, and, during my babysitting years, attachment parenting — each with its own jargon and figurehead (Doug Fields, Kristen Race, Janet Lansbury, and Dr. William Sears, respectively). Despite some superficial differences in their particulars, all are designed to swap out the old-fashioned, "because I said so" ethos of "authoritarian" child-rearing with one grounded in empathy and negotiation. Gentle parents give their children choices and respect their wants and needs. Instead of punishing unwanted behavior, gentle parents aim to validate their child's feelings and help them strategize their way out of distress, letting them learn through natural consequences. It is, in short, a very different way of raising children than what most of today's adults received from their parents.

Proponents of gentle parenting say it produces securely attached kids who are self-possessed, emotionally attuned, and kind — claims that seem to be supported by developmental-psychology research. But in practice, the parental authority required to make the approach work often flees the scene. Too often, gentle parenting gives way to leniency and overindulgence, creating brittle and self-centered "iPad kids" who are ill-equipped to navigate setbacks — and parents whose servile devotion to their children's happiness is a headache for the people around them. Teachers blame gentle parenting for bad behavior in classrooms, which some believe is accelerating an exodus from the profession. And new research suggests that the helicopter parenting that often dovetails with gentle-parenting-gone-awry is contributing to the youth mental-health crisis.

As a result, "gentle parenting" has become a loaded concept. Increasingly, parents are realizing that the time- and energy-intensive method is producing decidedly ambiguous outcomes, which has caused some to throw in the towel, once and for all. The gentle-parenting boom, as most of us know it, is beginning to look more and more like a bust.

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Though many of the practices associated with gentle parenting predate the term's coinage, the British author Sarah Ockwell-Smith is generally credited with bringing the label into the mainstream. Her 2016 book, "The Gentle Parenting Book," introduces the method as one that "embraces the needs of parent and child, while being mindful of current science and child psychology." Ockwell-Smith positions her approach as an "authoritative" parenting style, the conscientious middle ground between a "permissive" style of parenting in which the child is in charge and the authoritarian parenting tactics of the past — both of which researchers have found create long-term problems for kids.

In a 2014 blog post, Ockwell-Smith summed the approach up as "parenting with your child's feelings in mind as much as possible" and then taking those feelings into consideration when deciding how to react. "The key here really is thinking, 'Would I like it if somebody did this to me?'" she wrote. "If the answer is 'no,' then why would you do it to your child?"

For some parents, the guidance adds up to good common sense. Abby, a 38-year-old mom of two in a well-to-do suburb of Milwaukee, said she gravitated toward a gentle-informed parenting approach as a correction for the rules and expectations that came to bear on her own upbringing. Abby, who has asked Business Insider not to publish her real name to protect her children's privacy, appreciated that the method could be adapted to accommodate different developmental needs — both of her children have autism — and that it didn't force kids to meet society's ever-shifting goalposts for success.

Others are drawn to the philosophy's emphasis on cultivating independence and self-confidence, as opposed to obedience or external validation. For Anna Monette Chilstedt, a 36-year-old marketing director in Boulder, Colorado, this means adopting the Lansbury-approved "RIE" method — an infant-parenting pedagogy that encourages "sensitive observation" — to raise her 6-month-old daughter. "I want her to have a lot of self-confidence and -assurance that she knows how to keep her body safe, knows her limits, and feels confident that she will be cared for," Chilstedt said. "From there, she'll be equipped to handle whatever life throws at her."

If a parent's job is to help their child process their big and messy feelings, does that mean every negative emotion needs to become a conversation?

Mary Benedetti, a Toronto social worker and psychotherapist who works with children and families, said that there's a lot to appreciate about gentle-parenting guidance. "Parenting advice based on attachment research, trauma research, and neuroscience is extremely valuable to children," she told me. Ample research links an authoritative parenting style — such as gentle parenting — with the most favorable psychosocial outcomes in children.

Where some parents run into trouble is in the method's implementation. "Clear, kind, but firm limits are needed," Benedetti told me. Gentle parenting works only when there are ground rules in place for what constitutes acceptable behavior and caregivers who consistently uphold consequences when those lines are crossed. But the open-ended guidelines laid out by gentle-parenting authors and influencers don't always make hard behavioral limits easy to outline or enforce. A crowded arena of parenting experts and influencers — such as Instagram's "Dr. Becky" Kennedy and an endless supply of TikTokers — bring their own strategies and buzzwords into the mix, which can exacerbate confusion.

If a child is meant to feel empowered to make their own choices about how to engage with the world, when should the adult step in and say that the child's choices were wrong — to declare, "Actually, you've had enough bananas," regardless of whether the child agrees? And if a parent's job is to help their child process their big and messy feelings, does that mean every negative emotion needs to become a conversation? These are among the questions that gentle parents must contend with, often on the fly. Without meaning to, some of these parents may drift into permissiveness, ending up with kids who feel empowered to do everything but respect others.

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When gentle parenting veers off course, it can be detrimental. Research recently published in The Journal of Pediatrics found that a decadeslong trend toward high parental involvement — and, specifically, the diminished childhood independence that can result from it — neatly tracked with rising rates of depression and anxiety in children and teens, which have reached a record high. Separate research links permissive parenting with "high levels of aggressiveness, antisocial behavior problems, and lack of self-discipline." These attributes are not only unpleasant to be around but also risk a child's ability to form meaningful relationships — a key predictor of lifelong physical and psychological well-being.

Anna Lussenburg, a Calgary, Alberta, child-behavior interventionist known professionally as "Annie the Nanny," has seen the gentle-parenting pitfalls firsthand. Many of her clients, she said, are "former gentle parents" who are now contending with kids who put holes into walls, bite, and throw tantrums at the slightest provocation. From where she stands, there's no mystery as to why.

"With gentle parenting, there is this constant hyperfocus on helping your kids deal with 'big feelings,'" Lussenburg said. "But who says they're big? The adult is the one that's saying they're big. Feelings are feelings; we have all sorts of feelings all day. When we hyperfocus on the negative ones, we start feeling worse rather than better."

When gentle parenting goes wrong, everyone takes note.

Emphasizing a child's feelings can magnify minor problems and effectively puts the child in the driver's seat when what they really need is adult guidance. "When you stop doing whatever it is you are doing and you let your day be dictated by their behavior, you stop leading, which makes children very uncomfortable," Lussenburg said. "You're looking to them to tell you things are OK, instead of them looking to you."

While the dynamics between parents and children are generally a private matter, their implications are not. When a child's immediate desires become the lens through which they're expected to treat others, and vice versa, that framework becomes everybody's business. When gentle parenting goes wrong, everyone takes note.

Often, the debate over what constitutes "correct" gentle parenting comes down to social values. Should a child's feelings take precedence over how others experience that child's actions? Who should be held accountable for a disturbance in the peace? Where is the line between a child who feels empowered to self-advocate and one who's simply entitled? The research indicates that firm rules and consequences are needed. But when it comes to the thorny particulars of how to parent a child day-to-day, the debate becomes more about respect.

There are certainly plenty of sensible, developmentally appropriate reasons kids act out. Maybe they're hungry or tired, or they're distressed by the perfectly legitimate frustrations of being a small person navigating a big world without the benefit of a fully formed prefrontal cortex. Different kids come equipped with different neurodevelopmental tool kits or material circumstances that may make it easier or harder to emotionally self-regulate or modulate their behavior. They also misbehave because, yes, misbehaving is a normal part of growing up. Learning boundaries, testing them, and being an occasional pest are all part of the game.

But there's a difference between legitimizing a child's feelings and letting those feelings run the show. What people want isn't always what they need. Sometimes the child asking for his third banana just needs to be told "no."

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Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.

• The FTC is investigating Microsoft's deal with Inflection AI, the Wall Street Journal reported. 
• The probe examines if the deal was designed to dodge regulatory scrutiny and gain control.
• The Department of Justice is also scrutinizing such 'acquihire' deals in the tech industry.

The US' top competition watchdog is investigating whether Microsoft's deal to hire a majority of Inflection AI's workers and pay the company $650 million to license its tech was struck as a way to dodge scrutiny.

According to The Wall Street Journal, citing a person with knowledge of the matter and records it has seen, The Federal Trade Commission has requested documents from the companies dating back two years to understand whether the deal was formed to give Microsoft control of Inflection and fly under the radar of regulators.

Inflection's cofounder Mustafa Suleyman joined Microsoft to lead its AI efforts in March, and most of Inflection's 70-person staff followed. Inflection's new leadership team said last month that the company has just 12 people working there.

The Department of Justice is also looking at deals like this, referred to as "acquihires." The DOJ's antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter told the Financial Times that "acqui-hires are something that antitrust enforcers" will examine.

He continued: "We're not using stylistic or formalistic characteristics of how these companies [explain these deals]. What we look at are the market realities.

"We are focused on the facts. If the form is different but the substance is the same, then we will not hesitate to act," he said.

If the FTC finds that Microsoft should have reported the deal to regulators, the watchdog could ask a court to fine Microsoft or pause the deal while the FTC conducts a full-blown investigation and assesses how it impacts competition, per the WSJ.

Microsoft president Brad Smith told the FT that it didn't buy Inflection because "we didn't want to own the company." Instead, he said, Microsoft "wanted to hire some of the people who worked at the company."

Kanter also said urgent scrutiny is needed over Big Tech's control over AI.

When the Microsoft and Inflection deal was announced, spectators questioned whether this deal laid out a new blueprint for Big Tech to avoid the scrutiny of antitrust regulators.

Gavin Baker, managing partner of investment firm Atreides Management, said on X: "If the Microsoft/Inflection deal stands, then this is the roadmap for every large tech company to make acquisitions."

Microsoft, Inflection AI, and the FTC didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider, made outside of normal working hours.

• Jack Dorsey has been supporting alternatives to Twitter, the social-media platform he cofounded.
• Dorsey gave $10 million to a project called Nostr and 14 bitcoins to Nostr's anonymous founder.
• The founder is a Brazilian man who appears to be a big fan of a fascist conspiracy theorist.

In his quest to support alternative social-media platforms, Twitter's cofounder Jack Dorsey unwittingly funded a developer who's a follower of a Brazilian fascist, according to archived webpages and business records.

The funding, which supported the development of the decentralized social-media protocol Nostr, comes as Silicon Valley's rightward political drift has become more apparent and as some in tech's elite push back against what they perceive as overreach in censorship and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

Dorsey gave $10 million to a foundation supporting Nostr and 14 bitcoins, worth roughly $245,000, directly to Nostr's founder, who until now was known pseudonymously as Fiatjaf.

Nostr "has no board, no company behind it, no funding," Dorsey said in an interview with the Silicon Valley outlet Pirate Wires last month. "It's a truly open protocol. The development environment is moving fast. And I gave a bunch of money to them." Nostr has a relatively small user base of cryptocurrency and privacy enthusiasts, including Edward Snowden.

"We don't know who the leader is, it's like this anonymous Brazilian," Dorsey said.

That anonymous Brazilian is Giovanni Torres Parra, a developer who has also built at least two webpages devoted to disseminating the work of the far-right conspiracy theorist Olavo de Carvalho. Before he died in 2022 after contracting COVID-19, de Carvalho — known as Olavo — praised Brazil's military dictatorship, claimed that Pepsi-Cola was flavored with stem cells of aborted fetuses, preached that tolerance for homosexuality was "incompatible" with democracy, and had an office in Virginia decorated with portraits of Confederate generals.

Neither Dorsey nor Parra responded to requests for comment.

Olavo, who rose to prominence for railing against communists and a globalist conspiracy he claimed was creating a "worldwide socialist dictatorship," spawned a mass reactionary movement. His adherents in Brazil have marched in the streets chanting his name. Before his death, Olavo was seen by many as former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's "guru" thanks to the influence he wielded in shaping Bolsonaro's ultraconservative worldview.

On X, where Parra also went by Fiatjaf, his bio read, "Leftism is a disease." Parra left the platform within the past year.

Business Insider identified Parra by examining archived versions of a website for a software-development company created by Fiatjaf that revealed that the person behind the company was also the operator of a hostel in southeastern Brazil. The hostel's website indicates it is operated by Parra, and Fiatjaf's Google Maps reviews indicate he spends time in the neighborhood where the hostel is. On Fiatjaf's Github account, the license for some software written by Fiatjaf is assigned to Parra. BI also found a copy of Parra's university thesis, which matches details he provided to Forbes in a 2023 interview. The magazine agreed not to reveal his real name and referred to him only as Fiatjaf.

It's not clear how much of the $10 million Dorsey gave to support the development of Nostr will make its way to Parra. The money went to the nonprofit Open Sats Initiative, which funds bitcoin-related projects including Nostr. Parra, as Fiatjaf, sits on a committee established by the organization to organize Nostr development efforts, Bitcoin Magazine reported. The donations to Open Sats are among the largest gifts Dorsey has made as part of his #StartSmall grantmaking initiative.

The Open Sats Initiative did not respond to a request for comment.

But in 2022, Parra directly received 14 bitcoins, worth roughly $245,000, from Dorsey. After an X user suggested to Dorsey that he help fund Nostr, Dorsey replied within 24 hours, "funding deployed to @fiatjaf."

As Fiatjaf, Parra told Forbes that his political views were shaped by the laissez-faire Austrian school of economics and his entrepreneurial parents' negative experiences with government regulation in Brazil. Parra was frustrated by what he saw as Twitter's increasing censorship of users and wanted to build a decentralized protocol that would allow people to easily take their social-media profiles and followers to other networks if they disagreed with a platform's content-moderation policies.

Parra linked to the websites he created for Olavo on the homepage of his primary personal website. On Github, he published a timeline of his life showing he enrolled in an online philosophy course on the dangers of "cultural Marxism" that Olavo began offering in 2009.

On a podcast last year, Parra, as Fiatjaf, mused about the likelihood that "Nazis or racists or whatever" could see Nostr as a home for hate speech because the nature of the protocol means it has no centralized content moderation.

"I want to tell these people to go somewhere else, but I think we need these people, too," he said.

• Tori Dunlap is a 29-year-old multimillionaire who chooses to rent rather than buy.
• She feels that renting currently offers her more flexibility and is a smarter financial decision.
• While renting fits the current season of her life, she doesn't think she'll do it forever.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tori Dunlap, a 29-year-old Seattle-based financial educator and founder of Her First 100K. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

When I was 22, I almost bought a $175,000 condominium. A day before closing on the home, I backed out. That was one of the best financial decisions I've ever made.

Today, I'm a multimillionaire who still chooses to rent.

I think of renting as paying for a service, and liken it to a hotel. I get somewhere to sleep and to put my stuff. Also, I get a safe place to stay with certain luxuries that homeowners don't have, like flexibility and ease of mind.

I think the idea that renting is throwing money down the drain is absolute b.s. and one of the most pervasive personal finance myths that's just meant to shame people. I currently put my money in the stock market and see better returns than locking it into a mortgage.

Renting is a smarter decision for me right now

I live in a three-bedroom, two-bath townhouse with a garage in North Seattle, where the average home price is nearly $900,000. My rent is $3,250 a month. If I were to buy a similar place, my monthly payment — including mortgage, insurance, and taxes — would be higher than my current rent.

Renting is flexible, and I don't have to worry about things that homeowners worry about, like committing to a particular place or neighborhood or dealing with a burst pipe. I travel a lot for work, and I don't have the time or skillset to fix things if they break. My landlord lives in a house right up the hill from me, so when I need him, I can call him, and he's right there.

When you buy a house, there's a sense of permanence that I just don't have right now. In 2021, I actually packed up my entire apartment, ended my lease, and traveled and lived out of a suitcase for eight months. I'm glad I'm not doing that anymore, but I'm really glad I had that opportunity.

Renting is also a smarter financial decision right now, with how high interest rates are. It's cheaper to rent in many major cities.

I backed out of buying a house and became a millionnaire

At 22, I had just graduated and found a decent-paying job in Seattle. For the first couple of months, I lived with my parents.

My well-intentioned parents believed that buying a house would be a smart financial investment for me; otherwise, I'd just be giving my money away to somebody else.

Although my job was in Seattle, we looked at a $175,000 condo in the town that I grew up in 35 miles outside the city. I couldn't afford anything closer. I had enough money for a 10% down payment, and my parents were so passionate about me buying a house they were willing to loan me a bit of money if I needed it.

But it would've been a four-hour daily commute, and I wouldn't have been able to have a social life.

The day before signing on the condo, I decided to pull out.

I have no regrets about my decision. The condo is now worth over double what I would've paid, but I think my life would've been very different and much worse if I had gone through with buying it.

I probably wouldn't have started my business, which helped me become a multimillionaire, because being in Seattle allowed me to attend networking events, where I met my company's current COO.

I encourage people to consider three things before buying a home

1. Do you actually want to be a homeowner, or is it just what you think you're supposed to do?

That's the most important question. Is it something you want, or is it what your parents want for you? Do you only want to do it because you think it's a "smart financial investment"?

One of the reasons I didn't want to go through with my condo purchase at 22 was because it felt like a collaborative decision spearheaded by my parents rather than a decision I myself wanted to make.

Homeownership feels like something we have to do to become adults and build our wealth. So many people, especially those my age who can purchase homes, end up moving an hour out of the city to the suburbs.

I have friends who have moved a half hour outside the city and ended up selling their houses a year later because they couldn't see any friends or have their social community anymore.

There are a lot of things to consider beyond just whether a decision is financially smart.

2. What's the total homeowner cost, other than the mortgage?

There are more costs to being a homeowner than just the mortgage. I always want to encourage people to consider both the financial and mental costs of homeownership.

If you can't put down 20% for the down payment, are you paying for private mortgage insurance (PMI)? That's not the end of the world, but it's something to think about.

What is the total cost of owning a home — the mortgage, the insurance, the potential PMI, the property taxes, the maintenance costs, and any sort of refurbishing — compared to what you're paying renting?

There can also be homeowners association (HOA) fees. The average HOA fees I've seen in Seattle are around $400 a month. You need to be sure that if you're paying that amount of money, the property is managed well.

3. If you're thinking of taking out a mortgage, how good is your credit score?

If you have a pretty good credit score, it's going to make the cost of your house cheaper because you're going to get a better interest rate.

But if your credit score is not great, it might be worth spending six months diligently raising it before you start thinking about a mortgage.

I don't think I'll rent forever

My finances now are different than they were when I was 22. I can afford a house in the place I want to be now, and that's a privilege that comes with my financial standing.

For me, renting is a choice, but for many people, it's not. It's a decision made for them because of how inaccessible home ownership is.

Many policies could better support Americans' financial health and their ability to purchase real estate, such as addressing the student debt crisis, stagnating minimum wages, and lack of paid family leave.

Renting really fits the current season of my life, but I don't think this is the choice I'll make forever.

The itch to buy has been there for probably about a year. I'm 29, about to turn 30, and I'm in this transitional period, asking myself, "Where do I want to live? How do I want to spend my time? What do I actually want?"

I'm definitely going to miss the parts of renting that I love right now, such as the flexibility. But I want to put wallpaper up. I want to be able to customize my house. I want to know that I have a more permanent place I can come home to.

If you have a unique experience renting or buying a home and would like to share your story, email Jane Zhang at janezhang@businessinsider.com.

• Ukraine wants to train another 30 pilots for the F-16s it's going to get, Politico reported.
• But training facilities in Arizona, Denmark, and Romania can't fill that demand, per the outlet.
• That means Ukraine will likely only have 20 pilots for the 85 F-16s it's receiving from Europe.

Ukraine is urgently pressing the US and its allies to free up seats at their F-16 training schools so Kyiv can use the dozens of warplanes gifted by NATO members, Politico reported.

But the outlet reported, citing three anonymous sources familiar with the situation, that Ukraine's Western allies cannot train all the pilots Kyiv is asking for.

Politico reported on Wednesday that Ukraine is expected to field about 20 F-16 pilots this year and is asking the US if it can train an additional 30.

Yet, the F-16 school in Tucson, Arizona, can at most accept only 12 Ukrainian trainees at a time since other countries also have contracts to train their pilots at the facility, per Politico.

"We understand they don't want to break those contracts, but they could move their American pilots to a different base for training," Sasha Ustinova, a Ukrainian lawmaker who frequently lobbies Washington for aid to Kyiv, told the outlet.

The dozen Ukrainian F-16 pilots at Tucson are still being taught to fly their fighters or were part of the first batch reported in late May to complete their training, which the National Guard is providing.

There's also a training facility in Denmark. But, per Politico, it's only taken eight Ukrainian pilots and is set to close its F-16 program in November as it switches to the F-35.

Another training program in Romania, run by Lockheed Martin and subcontractor Draken, is expected to start soon. However, it's costly, and according to Politico, it plans to take only eight Ukrainian pilots.

With the Romania program not up yet, that means Ukraine is estimated to receive 20 F-16 pilots by year's end.

With operational F-16 squadrons usually including between 18 to 24 jets, Ukraine's unlikely to fly even a full squadron before 2025. Squadrons typically field several more pilots than the exact number of jets they have.

Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Belgium are donating 85 F-16s to Ukraine, enough to form what Kyiv's air force hopes will be four squadrons of about 16 warplanes. Brand-new F-16s cost about $63 million each.

These donated fighters, built in the 1980s, are more modern upgrades to Ukraine's current slate of combat aircraft and were once considered a possible tool for Kyiv to achieve vital air superiority with better weapons and radar range.

But US officials have cautioned that the F-16s won't be a cure-all for Ukraine.

The warplanes "will give the Ukrainians an increment of capability that they don't have right now," Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in May 2023. "But it's not going to be a dramatic game changer, as far as I'm concerned, for their total military capabilities."

• D-Day on June 6, 1944 was a gargantuan feat. Is it the last invasion of its kind?
• In World War II, the best way to stop an amphibious invasion was before troops reached the beach.
• Modern weapons and surveillance systems give a defender more power to accomplish that.

D-Day is more than the largest amphibious invasion in history. Even 80 years after the battle, it still resonates as an epic of courage, endurance, and prodigious effort.

But was D-Day the last invasion of its kind? Could such immense resources be mustered again in a modern-day version of "Saving Private Ryan"-style landings?

World War II marked the zenith of wars waged between mass armies, an era that began in 1792, and modern weaponry, from guided missiles and spy satellites to nuclear bombs, has obviated large-scale amphibious invasions.

Even by the standards of WWII, the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, was gargantuan. Operation Overlord embraced more than 2 million personnel, 13,000 aircraft and 7,000 vessels from a dozen nations. Six infantry divisions — three American, two British and one Canadian — would hit the beach simultaneously, while three airborne divisions — two American and one British — landed in the German rear.

Some 160,000 troops splashed ashore that Tuesday morning, including around 75,000 American and 61,000 British soldiers, plus 13,000 Allied paratroopers descending from the skies. And these were only the tip of a spear across Europe and the Pacific: the US Army expanded to 11 million personnel during the war — including 2 million in the European theater alone — while the British Army grew to 3 million strong.

These forces today are only a fraction of what they were then. The entire US Army only numbers around 450,000 active-duty soldiers; for Britain, it's 76,000 and shrinking. There were 1,200 warships escorting the D-Day convoys of soldiers and equipment: today's US Navy has just 290 major warships and amphibious vessels spread around the globe, while the Royal Navy is down to 66 commissioned vessels. The Royal Canadian Air Force's 86 squadrons made it the world's fourth-largest air force in 1945, including nearly 40 squadrons that fought at Normandy: today it has just four fighter squadrons with 77 aging F/A-18 Hornet fighters.

D-Day's Allied planners were haunted by two fears: getting ashore despite German coastal defenses – and then surviving the inevitable German armored counterattack from Panzer divisions waiting behind the beaches. This meant there had to be enough transport capacity to land a large assault force and then quickly reinforce it with troops, supplies, and especially the tanks and artillery needed to even the odds in an armored fight.

More than 3,000 landing and transport vessels were tasked with this mission. The US Navy now aims for enough amphibious capacity to land just two Marine brigades on a hostile shore. More than 1,000 American C-47s transport planes dropped three airborne divisions on D-Day. With just over 200 C-17 cargo planes to meet worldwide airlift requirements, the current US Air Force would struggle to airdrop the entire 82nd Airborne Division.

All of which points to a fundamental difference between 1944 and 2024. The major combatants 80 years ago were committed to total war, in which they mobilized their human and industrial resources to the utmost. Today's Western militaries are much smaller volunteer forces, sustained by a defense-industrial base with only a fraction of its 1940s capacity. As shown by persistent shortages of weapons and ammunition in the Russo-Ukraine War, even if enough soldiers could be drafted to mount a Normandy-sized invasion, there wouldn't be enough equipment for them.

In World War II, the best way to stop an amphibious invasion was before the first troops stepped onto the beach. If the defender's navy and air force could destroy or turn back an invasion fleet, the landing would never take place. D-Day could only happen because, after a long and bloody struggle, the German surface fleet had been decimated, the U-boats suppressed, and the Luftwaffe mauled. Its forces defending French coasts were also spread thin because of the necessity of countering an advancing Soviet force of 140 divisions on the Eastern Front.

Though it must have seemed otherwise to troops splashing ashore under heavy fire, the very fact that the invasion was happening meant the battle for the beach already tipped in favor of the Allies. They could count on the naval bombardment and bombing runs to target German strongpoints and hammer its forces massing for a counterattack.

Isolated from reinforcement and resupply by US ships and aircraft, Japanese troops on Pacific islands, by contrast, could fight to the last man and inflict heavy casualties, but their destruction or isolation was only a matter of time. German counterattacks almost drove Allied landings at Sicily, Salerno and Anzio into the sea, but aided by devastating naval gunfire, the bridgeheads held on.

Hitler placed great hopes in the Atlantic Wall, a fortified belt across 1,700 miles of coastline. The bunkers and machine gun nests did inflict some losses at Normandy, especially during the bloodbath suffered by American soldiers landing on Omaha Beach. But the Atlantic Wall was spread too thin to repel overwhelming Allied force at the landing sites.

In modern strategic parlance, stopping amphibious invasions is part of "anti-access/area denial," or A2/AD. Today's invasion planners worry that coastlines — and waters extending hundreds of miles from the beaches — are becoming no-go zones for warships and transports. Spy satellites and reconnaissance drones can discover an invasion fleet, exposing it to long-range attacks and giving the defender more time to mass troops and firepower in the likely landing zone. Coastal defense weapons include hypersonic anti-ship missiles streaking in at 10 times the speed of sound, GPS-guided cruise missiles and glide bombs, small but stealthy submarines, long-range guided artillery shells, and a variety of aerial and maritime drones. An enemy that has these can threaten the invasion armada and the landing force it launches as it chugs to the beach.

And it's not just major powers like Russia and China that have these arms: even smaller powers like Iran and North Korea could turn beaches into death traps.

There are already signs of this. In the 1982 Falklands War, the Argentine Air Force — armed with bombs and a few Exocet anti-ship missiles — sank six British warships and transports, and nearly derailed the invasion. And in the ongoing Ukraine war, despite initial fears that the Russian Navy would shell cities and land amphibious troops, the Black Sea Fleet has lost two dozen warships and amphibious vessels to anti-ship missiles and small, robotic boats packed with explosives. Russia may have a much larger navy than Ukraine, but it doesn't dare venture closer to the Ukrainian coast.

Of course, it can be argued that technology works both ways. Smart bombs can destroy coastal defenses. Helicopters can ferry troops and supplies from an amphibious fleet hundreds of miles away. Drones likes unmanned tanks and mine-clearing robots can clear beach obstacles.

Yet ultimately, what has really killed massive amphibious invasions is the poisonous mushroom cloud. Even as far back as 1945, after the US atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nations realized that a single bomb capable of destroying a city could also wipe out an amphibious fleet. The U.S. Navy tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946 vividly demonstrated how a nuclear blast could smash even battleships and aircraft carriers like bathtub toys. Russia for example is armed to the teeth with tactical nukes that could devastate a massed fleet.

This doesn't mean that amphibious operations are obsolete. They are still needed on a planet that is 71 percent water, and where the ocean is often the only feasible way to transport armies. But we should honor the memory of D-Day, because we shall never see another day like it again.

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

• Germany has received its last VIP-equipped Airbus A350 plane, creating a uniform fleet.
• The aircraft got a paint job and a swanky new interior, though details of the cabin are scarce.
• The A350s replaced Germany's old VIP A340s after maintenance issues forced them out of service.

Boasting the country's national colors of black, red, and gold on the fuselage and wingtips, the German Air Force, or Luftwaffe, has received its third and final fully-equipped governmental A350-900.

Inside the aircraft, which is named "Kurt Schumacher" after the German politician, is a new VIP cabin retrofitted by the aircraft service provider Lufthansa Technik.

The jet is used for political and parliamentary transport, carrying top officials like Germany's president Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

"Kurt Schumacher" was the first A350 built for the Luftwaffe, initially delivered in 2020.

Its Germany's third A350 aircraft fit with the swanky new cabin. The first two A350s complete with the VIP interior were sister planes "Konrad Adenauer" and "Theodor Heuss."

These aircraft were delivered factory-fresh in November 2022 and March 2023, respectively, with the new cabin already installed. The "Kurt Schumacher" A350 was sent back to Lufthansa Technik in early 2023 to get its retrofit.

"Only a few small accents in the interior, individual reminiscences of the respective namesakes, now distinguish "Adenauer," "Heuss," and "Schumacher" from each other," the company said.

Aside from the minor differences, Lufthansa Technik described the A350's new uniform fleet as having generous seating, an appropriate number of bathrooms, and a modern galley.

It represents a significant change from the interim cabin that was initially installed on the jet four years ago.

The "Kurt Schumacher" A350 once flew without a VIP cabin because, at the time, Germany was flying unreliable Airbus A340 government planes riddled with maintenance problems and needed replacements quickly put into service.

"In contrast to the [interim's] open cabin design, the various functional areas for political-parliamentary flight operations are now structurally separated from one another," Lufthansa Technik said after the delivery of the first VIP-equipped A350 in 2022.

The three A350 replacements cost Germany $1.3 billion, Aerotime Hub reported. This included about $325 million for the cabins and about $312 million for missile defense systems.

A company spokesperson told Business Insider that, due to security reasons, interior shots of the aircraft have not been released to the public.

Given this is the first VIP A350 project for Lufthansa Technik, there are no prior fully-built cabin designs for reference. The company has a concept for a corporate A350 that it released in 2016, which includes things like a bed, showers, and a spa.

It's likely Germany's private fleet will have a similar grandiose design and aesthetic, but it will also have those specific governmental touches.

Other countries' widebody governmental airplanes can give an idea of what that might look like.

For example, the US government fleet consists of two specially modified Boeing 747-200B quad-jets to carry the president.

The "Flying Oval Office" has three levels, 4,000 square feet of floor space, dining and conference spaces, an executive suite, and an office for the president and his or her entourage.

Separate living areas are available for senior staff, the Secret Service, and the media, among other guests.

Mexico's former governmental Boeing 787 had similar luxuries, including a bedroom and dining and office spaces, as well as rows of business-class-like recliners.

The country sold the "ostentatious" airliner for $92 million last year because its president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, refused to use it.