the material standard of living has been dropping and it's now getting to the point where people can't afford shelter any more and thus no more kids. CA's birthrate has already plummeted to a level lower than in the great depression several years ago.
What i don't get is why decreasing fertility is always presented so negatively in the media. falling fertility is a huge blessing in the long run. we can't keep growing our population exponentially.. there's already way more people on the planet than the planet can support (see overshoot theory; climate change, earth mineral shortages, shelter shortages, etc). Humans outnumber other animals (non-domesticated) by orders of magnitude: it's not natural or sustainable.
i was playing word games with it, got some funny results and decided to debug it.. I asked it which letter position is the letter o in the word hockey and it literally told me the word "Hockey" does not contain the letter 'o'.
Don't blame yourself. Software engineering tools are supposed to serve the programmer, not the other way around. If a tool is too hard to use, then you're using the wrong tool. Tools should serve the developer. I would recommend plain old javascript with a light wrapper on top, like jquery. I know i'll get downvoted for this but a lot of "modern" javascript frameworks don't properly abstract the underlying layer properly (read Joel spolsky's article on leaky abstractions) and this results in a lot of problems. Furthermore, they optimize for the wrong thing: writing code. Most engineers spend 95% of their day reading code and that's a lot harder than writing code.
personally I try to grow as much clover in my grass as possible. it has so many benefits: it uses a bit less water and stays more green without nitrogen inputs and can even help fix a little bit of nitrogen in the soil. then I use both the grass and clover, when I cut it, as a nitrogen source to top the soil with.
Also, GDP is inaccurate because the CPI is innacurate. compare the CPI with any realistic way of measuring inflation such as case shiller, the big mac index or the price of oil in barrels and you'll quickly see that the CPI is undercounting by a several percentage points per year. she shadowstat: http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts
Also, related, check out Nate Hagens work on the Great simplification (he's got a podcast and on youtube). I won't spoil it here but he and his team of scientists have made some very interesting discoveries on future GDP growth.
i've learned from reading glassdoor reviews, that you have to read the review rather than go by the star ratings. the star ratings often don't reflect what written in the review. for example, you'll see lots of amazon reviews that are 3, 4 or even 5 stars but a lot of the time the truth comes out in the text review itself.
I think it's okay to pursue economic efficiency and productivity gains/GDP but not at the expense of happiness, not at the expense of health, not at the expense of worklife balance, not at the expense of the environment. It's a matter of having our priority list straight.
I'm just glad people are starting to realize this is a reality. If you look at all the projections, right now, most people still think everything's gonna keep going up in that exponential growth curve.
As for economic growth. The point is to increase material living standards but this isn't the case anymore. We've already peaked, as of 20 years ago in the US. If you take GDP per capita and divide it by any reasonable measure of inflation such as the case shiller housing index, you'll find that our ability to shelter people has decreased for nearly 25 years now and arguably even longer than that. 200 years ago, Henry david thoreaugh was saying people had mortgages of 10 to 15 years which he felt was an extremely long time. Now, it's quite common to have them be 30 years!
all i can tell you is he's interviewed experts with deep extensive knowledge of how oil is used. there's one interview with a guy where the guy explains in details how all the parts of oil are used for over 45 min! most of it was over my head. some of his videos do go into great detail about how reknewables can't take the place fully. I think part of it is that wind and solar are too intermitent and that, that greatly limits their applicability.
I didn't realize this until I came across Nate Hagens work on Oil/Gas, etc. He's got a PHD and extensive research expertise on oil and natural resources of the world. He's telling us, oil is absolutely pivotal for global GDP. Furthermore, what I found interesting about his works (very surprising): reknewable energy sources are not independent of oil, they depend on oil just like everything else. and he's got some rather stunning discoveries on oil and GDP.
i don't see why this was downvoted. It's entirely correct that the impact on the russian economy was far less than hoped for. One youtube documentary I saw stated -2% GDP, whereas the expected amount people wanted and expected was on the order of 20 to 30%. they go into quite a bit of detail on why this is the case. And USD, is well on track to be displaced in a few decades: central banks across the world are dumping dollars on average 6% of US dollar reserves per year (although this was already started abeit more slowly in 2008).
UBI in itself won't help anything without many other changes. I've run the numbers many times: there simply isn't anywhere near the amount of wealth needed.
In order to help people we need to find ways to drastically cut costs on housing. First start with the land: there's more acres of land in CA than people. the problem is just we're not allowed to build anything, anywhere. Secondly, we need to remove all the regulatory roadblocks that prevent markets from solving the housing crisis. if 3rd world countries can afford to build housing, we should be at least be able to do so as well.
Over the long term, All these excessive forms of travel are going in the wrong direction. It's not even a matter of ethics or morality. Peak oil is here (Source: Nate Hagens, Shell, etc ~ all predicting less and less oil available). The ramifications are vast and transportation is only going to get increasingly expensive as the material standard of living declines over the next several decades and centuries. Even normal airplane travel will get increasingly expensive, and less and less available to the middle and upper class.
The future is cheaper more energy efficient forms of travel like bicycles, e-bikes, micromobility and dare i say, walking.
It's worse than you think. This bill isn't really about Tik Tok. Read the fine print: people caught using a VPN could be thrown in jail for 20 years! It's about giving govt unchecked authority to throw people in jail.
Should banks and financial platforms decide who is and who isn't doing illegal things? The more we expect financial institutions to take on this task, the more they need to crack down on anyone who even looks like they're doing something criminal. This is how you end up with those situations where random people get their financial accounts frozen with absolutely no recourse. Just imagine, if you accepted an international wire from a family member in another country and next thing you know all your accounts are frozen. Do you really want your financial institution to be the judge, jurry and executioner?
There's a time and place to go after criminals but I don't think that financial institutions are the ones who should be making the final decisions on these things - that should be left for law enforcement.
That happens to me all the time. The vast majority 99%+ of the stuff that is advertised to me misses the mark completely. It's stuff I don't want or need. they give me ads for newbie programming after I've been a SE for 20+ years -> that's especially ridiculous since i use gmail all the time. I can only imagine that none of information they have on me can be used in any way shape or form.
I just figured if they knew me better perhaps and were able to use that information, just maybe they could offer me something I might actually be interested in.
Absolutely! You can't possibly say you own something if you have to pay rent on it to keep it. and not allowing someone to even own a home is basically tantamount to taxing their right to live.
And, you can always have a tiered system, for example, 0% on the first 1 million, then 0.5% on the next 500k, etc. that way at least people can downsize to something that they can own.
i don't understand the hate towards ad tech that learns about you. the alternative is ads that are completely irrelevant to you, ads that treat you like some anonymous user in which case you'll get endlessly irrelevant ads for mainstream stuff like ICE cars, plastic garbage, big screen tvs, fast food, etc.
housing doesn't need to be unaffordable. 200 years ago people paid of their houses in 10 years or less! this issue isn't mortgages. the issue is houses are way too big and land is too costly and regulation drives up the cost to build, oh and property taxes of course. address those 3-4 issues and everyone can afford housing with ease.
and not just table scraps, you can give them all kinds of stuff growing in the garden, even some weeds. or have some cabbage that didn't work out, give it to chickens etc.
sadly, there are so many HOAs that crack down on this kind of stuff and don't want people to be self sufficient.
i wish we could get the EUV! it's way big enough for all our family needs. unfortunately, my wife has been conditioned to believe that an large SUV is what our family needs. gosh, advertisements are effective, either that or most people just have clausterphobia.