volkl48

While I'm willing to believe banks are very security minded in terms of their core infrastructure, banks do not appear to be with regards to their customer access and usually seem to move very slowly to secure that end of things.

Hell, many/most of these large institutions seem to still only support SMS for 2FA and even that's a relatively recent introduction to actually mandate.

Which is to say, I expect banks to be about the very last significant account you use to mandate this technology (if it takes off), not the first.

A - Sure, there's no totally objective truth. There's societies on the planet where being as heavy as possible is/was thought to be attractive, or being covered in facial tattoos, or whatever else.

However, the basics of what is physically attractive within the society you live are likely straightforward enough that if your likeness is posed to 100 others, you'd get a pretty closely clustered set of ratings.

If your interests trend towards a particular subgroup/subculture you may wish to further optimize for what's generally more attractive to that group.

B - That seems obviously wrong? Physique, grooming, clothing, etc - virtually no one is at the upper bounds of what they can do in these kinds of areas and they have a massive effect on how physically attractive someone is viewed to be.

Sure, that doesn't mean that everyone can become the most attractive person on the planet that way....but they absolutely have the agency to influence how attractive they are to others, significantly.

This feels like it only makes much sense if you had an unsatisfying youth yourself or truly never wanted to do any of that exploring (you'd have turned it down even if the opportunity presented itself).

It takes two to play. I had some fun in my teens + 20s, I learned some things about myself and relationships, mostly pleasantly but occasionally not. I don't begrudge others for spending their youth exploring and learning the same sorts of things.

I'm not supporting someone I'm dating financially - they've usually got a decent career going, they don't need and aren't asking for my wallet.

Kind of but your example isn't great.

It's in some senses more of a concern with things like HPV + HSV, where there's not a lot of testing options and barrier contraception is of much more limited effectiveness. (that said, Gardasil vaccination helps).

For most other STIs - either get tested before every new partner or on a reasonably frequent basis, and demand the same from every new partner.

HIV prevalence + transmission likelihood is wildly skewed to gay/bi men who are active with men - and if you are one who's actively having new partners you probably ought to also talk with your doctor about PrEP.

Maybe (or maybe not - how much attention does the average person pay to California Prop 65 warnings?), but warning labels on consumer products won't do much of anything to curb their use in industry and non-consumer facing products.

It being federally illegal and something you're prohibited from doing while employed with the federal government means it's at least usable as a mild form of blackmail/leverage if they have evidence you currently use it.

Current use = you're fired + lose your security clearance.

Sure, I don't think most people are going to pick "here's the nuclear codes Mr. KGB agent, just don't tell them about the weed!", but it's enough of an opening to convince some people to divulge some information that they shouldn't.

Add on a few more vulnerabilities - maybe they're struggling a little financially and their job skills don't translate well outside their current government role, and just the threat to their job security can be something significant.

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Obviously, federal legalization would basically solve this issue.

Movies + Music aren't the same medium, though.

Music doesn't have ever-increasing production costs, and if anything it's easier than ever to get something out there on the primary distribution mechanisms used by the public to consume media.

It certainly has it's own business problems but I don't see any lack of interesting, risk-taking music out there. Even as a fan of genres largely far out of the mainstream I often feel like there's so much great new stuff that I can't keep up with it all.

Valve/Steam is more than large enough to fund any legal fights it wants to have forever.

Understandably, I don't think Valve has any interest in fighting this battle for Dolphin, but they certainly have the money to do it.

For one argument, consider the disparities between the # of people who've used a type of drug at some point in their life, vs the # that have used them in the past year, vs the # that have used them in the past month.

While some % of those are people who got help and quit in the past year, or people on the start of a downward spiral/addiction, plenty of those seem to just be infrequent users.

Unless the drug kills you so frequently/quickly that you can't sustain use for long or is rapidly gaining users for a new addiction crisis, the level of greater than monthly users should be higher if most of those infrequent users are going to become addicts.

https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/reports/rpt3...

You can further see that the spread of yearly vs monthly use is closer for substances typically considered more addictive and wider for those less thought to be. (not a lot of LSD addicts out there, relatively speaking).

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My experience is that a lot of people are very quiet about their drug use outside the environment where they dabble in it and never mention it at all in company where they're uncertain about how it'll be viewed, so I also suspect that you may not recognize most of those people as people who'd use drugs at all.

I'm a big live music person and being around people using drugs somewhat comes with the territory, especially festival-type environments. But most of the people I've met at those things don't do much of those substances otherwise aside from possibly weed. They've got their once or twice a year time of hitting up the party drugs for their weekend of fun + music, but that's it.

If you don't speak fluent French and want to live there (as a tourist is fine, although outside MTL + Quebec City, English proficiency by the residents should not be assumed), your government dislikes you and is generally trying to make your life harder in as many ways as it can think of. I would expect that to continue getting worse.

On the HN/startup crowd note, that includes mandates that business in the office be generally conducted in French if you have 25+ employees, and there's significant enforcement powers to those mandates now.

Beyond that, the economy has lagged that of other provinces over past decades, although in recent years that's been less true - remains to be seen if that performance is a break with the long-term trends or not.

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More subjective:

It's generally going to be the "big government" model. Highest taxes on high earners in Canada, generally a reputation for more social services, more regulations.

Climate's pretty rough to many, although not extreme by Canadian standards. Still, it's a big difference from Southern Ontario or Vancouver.

Montreal is basically the only major "world" city, Quebec City is about the only other one of some national/international significance.

While it may look big on a map or as a number, in reality nearly the entire population lives in a relatively small corridor and much of the land area of the province is virtually uninhabited and in many cases basically inaccessible short of a helicopter or serious wilderness expedition. It will not feel anything like being 4x the size of Germany even if it technically is, for an example.

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Anyway, the power is cheap because it all comes from large hydro plants up north, they're blessed by geography in that sense.

The majority of the population is overweight and more than a third are obese, with the numbers of both on a steady upward climb for decades.

Traditional methods are already out there and this health crisis is just getting worse each year. The average person is clearly not having success with them, and saying "if they just try harder" or putting some different spin on them hasn't done a thing to fix the trajectory of this problem in the past 30 years, so I can pretty confidently say that there is zero chance they will somehow solve this societal problem in the future.

Being significantly overweight has immense health consequences and imposes huge costs on both the individual and society. I think it's incredibly, incredibly unlikely that the costs or health risks of this medication are higher than the well-documented costs of people continuing to be significantly overweight.

And FWIW: I say this as a thin person with no trouble with my own weight.

> Meanwhile, stationary class (i.e. relatively poor energy density) iron air batteries are making commercial progress. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/06/12/form-energy-to-deploy...

Also seems worth mentioning ESS. https://essinc.com/

They're a bit further along (scaling up from low-volume production, some installs in the wild) with a different approach to the use of iron (flow batteries).

They had 700 staff 2 years ago, which is really what raises giant questions to me.

There's very little I can think of that seems to have changed about the site in the last 2 years for results from tripling their headcount.

Citation for the old headcount: https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/9/22274077/reddit-funding-ro...

City/place subreddits tend to turn into an endless sea of the same question if unmoderated:

"I'm coming to visit as a tourist/think of moving here - tell me everything interesting to do in the city, where to eat, and where to stay/live"

These tend to be better answered by a wiki section, or a once a month/year thread that all those are referred to - because 95% of them are pretty much all the same for the answers.

That can basically overwhelm all actual news/discussion about the city and most of the larger city subreddits ban/restrict those for a reason.

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There's certainly places with mods run amok harming the ability to have constructive discussions/discuss certain topics most would find worthwhile, but a problem with one city's subreddit isn't every city's subreddit.

A glance at Toronto (I don't normally follow it) suggests they don't allow questions because they have set up a separate subreddit specifically for questions - /r/askTO. (NYC also does this with /r/asknyc). Aside from the past two days, it seems like decent questions over there get a decent response rate, and there's ~180k members, so it's not as though they're being kicked off to oblivion.

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> I've browsed new for years on it and it's _extremely_ rare I see content like that and I highly doubt the mods are acting so fast that they're seeing things I before I do with how often I sat on new auto-refreshing the page.

I will note that it's likely that a lot of the crap is being caught by how they've set up automod (and so, never makes it even to "new"), but depending on what they're doing, that probably still requires a human to sift through the results for stuff that they actually want to allow/is caught up in the filtering rules by mistake.

Long-time user of the site, although currently taking a break:

I'd strongly disagree with that. Mods do an immense amount of work on Reddit just to keep their subreddits remotely on topic and not filled with constant reposts and spam. Also, they're the ones who actually deal with most of those reports - they don't get handled by magic or admins in most cases.

Unmoderated/absentee mod subreddits are frequently overrun by spam nonsense or taken completely off topic.

> If people keep upvoting and enjoying the same stupid memes and jokes why do moderators feel like they need to step in and disrupt what the people find enjoyable?

Because then every subreddit becomes basically the same thing and you might as well just have a giant impossible to navigate pile of content that's at best vaguely related to what the place it was posted is supposed to be for.

A lot of users spend part of their time just scrolling their home page feed and part of their time looking at specific subreddits. When doing the former, they're (IMO) less inclined to vote on if it fits in the place it was posted or not, just on if they like it - they may not even notice what sub it was actually posted in.

But that can ruin the subreddit as a place for a specific type of content, which is the typically the reason they joined/followed that subreddit in the first place.

> But if every fraction of a degree matters, shouldn't we also be at least continuing if not scaling up these these albedo-increasing changes?

Acid Rain is also a bad thing with bad consequences.

While I'm not necessarily that opposed to cautious attempts at some geoengineering, I don't think "scale up the sulfate emissions" is a viable solution.

The US overproduces food to an absurd degree and isn't even remotely close to maximizing it's ability to grow it.

Anyway, Ag shifted production to the Southwest because when you don't pay the actual value of the water, it's great - lots of sun, long growing season, basically free water = cheapest production.

When water costs money....you'll see quite a bit of that production shift back up north.

Just tried it....I'm not very convinced in it's modeling.

I live near the top of a large, steeply sloped hill and water does not flow past/towards the house. It claims there is a 97% chance of a foot or more of water reaching my house in the next 30 years. It at least doesn't claim there would be damages, but there's really no way for what it claims to actually occur.

The FEMA maps also have reliability problems but I'm not sure this is more reliable.

I don't think the data supports your hypothesis, at least if we're talking recent declines in rich countries from their prior levels and not trying to answer "why does the US have a lower birth rate than Mauritania".

Birth rate declines in the US in the past 15-20 years have been entirely among the poor. Among the higher-income they've been basically stable.

Here's a simple chart: https://www.statista.com/statistics/562541/birth-rate-by-pov...

From 2005-2021, the change in birth rates by group:

Below poverty level - down 25%

Income 100-199% of poverty level - down 15%

Income 200%+ of poverty level - up 2%.

As point of comparison - mean age of first birth for a woman in 1970 was 21.4.

In 2017 it was 26.8. In the kinds of places people on this site usually hail from, it was near 30. (MA being oldest, at 29.3)

Being quite a few years older than when people typically had kids a generation ago, is probably going to result in some differences in how easy it is.

Not saying that's a full explanation either, but it's likely at least part of it.

Russia: Eh, no. That's just a temporary blip caused by a lot of the people born before 1945 not having made it that far, so the population was unnaturally skewed young. Few elderly to be dying off at the time because a large portion of those people died off 50-60 years prior.

They're set for sharp decline going forward, and changes in geopolitics look likely to dry up or outright reverse their modest immigrant flows from former USSR countries.

Japan: Is shrinking ever more rapidly, not less.

Marriage rates are also there, so that statistic is not really that surprising.

Most of the people who would have been getting divorced in the 1970s, today look like a relationship that fails after a few months or years, before reaching the point where they would have decided to get married.

There's 2-3+ groups of unpartnered people though.

- Wanted to be partnered - unsuccessful at finding that long-term partnership.

- People who didn't want to be partnered - and there's likely subgroups here:

- People who aren't desiring of much social contact at all.

- People who are highly social but not desiring that long-term romantic partnership, and have a lot of relationships of varying degrees of attachment throughout their lives and strong social ties to others - including close friendships.

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Most literature I've seen on the "unmarried people die younger" doesn't really seem to look at anything beyond maybe splitting the never married | divorced | widowed groups.

It can be a true statement for that as a whole but not necessarily true for the "unmarried by choice with an extensive network of close friendships + social connections" group being suggested by the article and by most "learn to love being single" people.

They likely don't look a whole lot like the lives of the "unsuccessful at finding a partner" or "dislike social contact" groups.

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To counter-argue myself though - the average number of close friends + social connections has been shrinking overall in the population. I don't know if it's great advice for the average person, since they're objectively doing worse at building those possible alternative connections than prior generations. And I'm not sure it's because they're too laser-focused on a partnership.

I don't think I am, at least speaking to the US, but if you've got a particular argument I'm open to hearing it.

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Just as some related examples to illustrate that there's a whole lot of children not growing up in some idealized life though:

~23% of children in the US live with one parent and no other adults in the household.

~40% of children born to married parents in the US will see those parents divorce before they turn 18.

~40% of children are born to unmarried parents. I don't know where to find what the rate for those parents splitting up is, but I'll assume it's probably not better than the married ones.

1/7 children experienced abuse or neglect in the past year, 1/4 will at some point in their childhood.

Life is a series of choices, and it's impossible to explore every path you could take.

> But I do feel like you don't get a chance to understand what being a parent is all about.

That's 100% accurate.

There's a pretty much infinite number of possible life experiences I'm not going to get to experience personally and will not have the time/money/ability to fit into my lifespan. The wishlist of things I'd love to do or experience someday continually grows longer - no matter how much I try to fit more of them into my life.

Taking on what amounts to a lifetime commitment and a massive investment of time and money for an experience that I have zero interest in and think I would actively dislike, seems like a terrible use of my finite resources.

> It forces you to change, maintain a good relationship w/ your partner, be a good role model, etc.

Perhaps it inspired you to do that. But the divorce rate and number of parents out there are terrible role models, suggest that it's not exactly the case for everyone.

I'll also suggest that people who don't have much interest in becoming parents are probably a whole lot more likely to wind up on the negative side of those possibilities should they wind up having children anyway.

1) You may be good at this or have some situation in terms of support structures or lifestyle where this is particularly easy, but this is not at all what many parents I know/encounter express to me (as a person who's openly childfree). The combination of more than one kid and 2 parents working FT out of the home, seems to equal an absolutely exhausting long-term grind for many unless they've got a lot of family nearby who are both willing and able to share that load.

2) To be replaced by endless after school activities/sports, events, and other child-related things. Fine if you like them, but if not you're not seriously getting your free time back until maybe the teenage years. A decade+ in the prime of your life is not a "mere blip" to many.

3) You do (which is great - clearly you're the sort of person who should have kids). There are a lot of people who have children and....don't suddenly find an appreciation for children. The vast number of children in the world with a willfully absent, abusive, or simply disinterested and not loving parent stand as a clear counter-argument, and the statistics on child abuse/neglect are pretty awful.

On the anecdotal side - It's pretty heartbreaking how many of those I grew up with (who had outwardly normal, upper middle class families) turned out to have those sorts of terrible parents and traumatic childhoods...and those are just the ones I know about. I'm thankful I didn't have that childhood, but a shocking number of children do.

I think it's misleading to promote this ideal like it's just going to happen for everyone who has kids and leads to people who shouldn't have children having them and resenting them or worse.

On the contrary. Society remains largely being run by ever older and ever more out of touch people.

We're likely decades from any serious level of "society being run by millennials".

This thread touches on some good examples of how we've basically had a blockade of the boomer generation in leadership for the past 20 years or so.

https://mobile.twitter.com/p_millerd/status/1220728129737707...

If you are looking for lots of prime-age workers to assemble stuff in a factory cheaply.....Yes?

Which is better in terms of the well-being of the population and all that is a separate question.

That point doesn't seem particularly intuitive to me. A society in population decline is a society where the old outweigh the young. You would seemingly have a higher ratio of long-term experts to young learners than you do under a population growth scenario.

If there is a risk, your risk isn't that you have too few experts to offer training, it's that the young learners are spread too thin. There aren't enough people looking to learn for all the people who have knowledge to pass down and so you lose knowledge in that transition.

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With that said, I find the general premise that we would be looking at some kind of dark age with the level of population decline any of us are likely to see in our lifetimes, nearly comical.

The global population now is around 8 billion. It was around 3 billion in 1960 (4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1987, 6 billion in 1999). It doesn't seem to me that the pace of change or technological advancement was particularly slow in any of those time periods, and the substantial productivity gains since then would alone suggest that we'd be more efficient for those population levels than things were at that time.

Many people feel the small (possible) reduction in average lifespan is worth the enjoyment or quality of life they get from those things.

Optimizing your life strictly around maximizing potential lifespan is certainly an option, but one that many people would feel is an unworthy tradeoff with what they'd have to give up.

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The difference with smoking vs the other things mentioned frequently in this thread (beyond likelihood of addiction), is that the reductions in lifespan with smoking are huge.

The average smoker loses at least a decade of their expected lifespan from what I can see.

Alcohol's effect on expected lifespan is more disputed, but even those claiming it's a negative in all quantities, generally make far smaller claims as to the degree of reduction for moderate/average use than are the case for smoking.

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Additionally, the average smoker doesn't appear to even be particularly fond of their activity. I do not meet many middle aged smokers that talk in any sort of particularly positive terms about their smoking or that seem to have positive memories associated with it.