792 karma · joined February 23, 2026
Personally, I would love to have a few kids but after many years of trying and all manner of treatments we have gotten nowhere at all. But that is just how if falls I guess.
There is just not enough labor/time for people to have kids and also sustain the elderly that can no longer contribute to the same degree.
Here in Australia, we tipped below replacement rate in 1976 and it has never recovered, we just increase immigration to cover the gap. Culturally this has been brilliant but economically it has made some oddities in that housing is through the roof as there is far more customers for it than their would have been otherwise. But it does provide a lot of younger workers that manage to keep the pension system going and the demand on that system is only going to grow for decades to come.
The alternative is that you restrict immigration and we end up in the Japan position. A crumbling pension system and a lack of people to keep ever maintenance up of a lot of infrastructure and sheer labor availability.
I have wondered that as this situation grows globally, what happens when a lot of nations that have typically had a lot of emigration end up shutting the tap off as yhey feel they need their people more in their country? They can starve others of immigrants and potentially become a large political tool in decades to come. Interesting times ahead.
It is the difference between a solution and a predicament. A solution fixes the issue, a predicament has only response merely that try to take the least bad path down. This looks like a predicament.
I do fear for the younger folks, the kids and a generation or two afterwards nowadays as they are going to end up lumped with this mess. But after that things should settle down into a new stable phase. This isn't the end of civilizations it is just a re-calibration, it just take generations to occur.
This is an issue that develops over decades and places like Japan, South Korea and potentially China, this is already baked in to the point that it is unstoppable. The same is coming to many other nations over the coming decades.
Think of it like security backed bonds, if you bundle a lot of dud businesses into a single business that is doing ok then as an aggregate it looks fine. So bundling Twitter and xAi into SpaceX covers up that. This is why I suspect they will eventually merge Tesla into SpaceX as it is on the decline now.
The problem is that with the current cash on hand and large loans coming due, they only have a 6 month runway. Thus the IPO to get other peoples money to hopefully fund themselves until solvent.
All IPO's are essentially that, people invest in your business, the business uses their money to achieve more, and if it all works out then future profits can eventually be paid back to investors.
Now that they have to wait a year for that point, that cash burn is going to work against them fairly heavily. There is also something like $20 billion of debt they have to pay back in the next 12 months that might not be covered over so easily now.
That said, SpaceX and a lot of Elons companies have had figures that look terrible for ages, and yet they keep manage to pull rabbits out of the hat. So who knows. Maybe they sell a bunch of assets, they have more than enough to cover the gap.
Credit to our current system, if there was a need to cut back, we have a lot of easy cuts to gain some wiggle room.
And yet, look at what is happening. Year after year the exponential growth continues without a blip! It is one of those things that looked impossible initially but obvious in retrospect.
My broader long term fear is that if we essentially get "limitless" energy, we continue to harm the ecosystem in other ways. Like giving a drug addict a limitless bank account. But we are still a long way from that point.
Ps1 also only had a 4KB cache but it could also dynamically manage it for larger textures but that came with a large performance penalty.
The blur on N64 was a combination of that and small cartridge size. It graphics setup did have some advantages, look at Mario 64 for example. The hills in the distance are usually just a few polygons with some low resolution textures stretched over them. The filtering and perspective correction means it is a very consistent image, you would not be able to do that on PS1 without it becoming a visual mess.
PS1 affine rendering was fast but limited, which for the release window was good enough.
That isnt to say that technology hasn't improved (duh!) Just that at that point there was enough grunt and memory that you could approximate what you want without massive compromise.
I still think this is true. But we will take the extra capabilities while we are here.
Wouldn't be surprised if that finally gets sunset in the next few years.
I mean they are fairly active, eat fairly lean meals and don't have much constant stress, so they are ideal conditions for longevity.
Knowing my luck some hyper cancer will just come out from somewhere and take me out in a few weeks or I just slip down the stairs one day. But I try to sway the odds.
Alas, the age restrictions came in and the big warning on the front covers was added. It did kind of backfire because that warning started to become a badge of quality to younger people. A similar thing could happen here. If you restrict it then it becomes the forbidden fruit.
I have said it for decades, if there weren't bad players then we wouldn't need any of this security. That is a very utopian idea.
I have thought that a way to put people off is to have such an anaemic server that they wouldn't bother. Like a tiny RiscV board running Haiku that delivers basic HTML and email. There is little incentive to raid that thing. I haven't thought this idea through much however.